Microsoft’s just released Kin phones will probably sell well enough for Redmond to be able to claim their releases successful. There are plenty of microsofties out there who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and won’t buy any computing product unless it has either Intel inside or Windows on the screen. And the teen crowd, Kin’s targeted market, will most likely turn the Zune based phone into a fad for fifteen or twenty minutes, until the wrong people get one. Also, there’s the cheap factor. With rebates, the Kin One can be had for fifty bucks.
But the Kin will most likely only be a blip on the sales charts. The real test for whether Redmond will be able to reenter the mobile market successfully will come later this year with the release of Windows Phone 7. Although many tech writers are already boosters of this OS, I’m betting it barely gets out the gate.