ByronM - 1:21 am on Apr 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'm not seeing anything particularly innovative, but it's interesting that MS is finally making an attempt to keep up with the mobile OS industry.

What? thats just being stubborn

1. Kin studio - Backing up phone, reviewing photos/videos, reviewing text messages, studio even integrates with "kin loop" and "kin spot" so you can integrate with your social networks connected on your phone or on your desktop (probably web/silverlight based). If you lose your phone, you just restore it from your kin studio.

2. Kin spot creates a one stop icon to share everything with your kin. a single ui interface that accept every ui element of your connected phone to share with the people you know. Its very innovatinve

3. Kin loop - builds upon the new tiles of the WP7 interface and presents everything easily.. pretty much the defacto for all phones, but pretty amazing to pull off for what will be a "contract phone" rather than a 3-400.00 smart phone.

4. The camera and video experience is pretty darn good and improved upon by many phones - especially how easily it is integrated with the social networking functionality. Its also backed up to your kin studio.. My wife has lost a lot of videos/pics on her iphone due to the thing dying/needing hard resets

5. The zune eco-system is pretty amazing. 14.95/month for unlimited songs on multiple devices and "keep 10" = great value. The rental experience is also standardized across all zune devices so you can rent and play on your PC, xbox, windows media center and zune devices.

Sounds pretty innovative to me - especially for the mid market that this phone will be going after

I realize engadget seems hell bent on mocking the device and only a few people are even bothering to recognize how innovative this is for the market its going after (which isn't the iphone users who accept paying 1,200 bucks a year for a phone)