With the Microsoft Kin handsets having been discontinued by the company within two months of their launch in early May, there have been countless reports on web blogs, deciphering the reason behind the ‘killing’ move.

The Kin smartphones – Kin One and Kin Two – were probably doomed right from the outset, beginning with the notably appalling first wave of reviews. Most of the leading tech sites – including Engadget, Gizmodo, and CNet - virtually panned the handsets as one of the worst devices to have hit the market in recent times.

With reports making rounds about the supposedly cheap Kin hardware and their limited features, it was no surprise that the sales of the handsets were pretty pathetic – falling in the range of between 500 and 10,000 units sold in all.

The figures are apparently very low for any handset, more so for the Kin pair that Microsoft spent $1 billion in developing!

To make the matters worse, the pricing of the handsets by Verizon Wireless was obnoxiously high, given the fact that the handsets were largely aimed at the teenagers – with both the phones requiring a $40 monthly voice plan and a $30 monthly data plan, their individual cost worked out to be $1,680 before taxes and fees.

Furthermore, despite their neat user interface and some cool social networking integration on the home screen, the limited features stood in the way of categorization of the Kin pair as smartphones!