[2] Microsoft invested two years and about US$1 billion developing the Kin platform,[3][4] beginning with its acquisition of Danger Incorporated.

[9] Microsoft scrapped its planned European release, stopped promoting the devices, ceased production, and reassigned the Kin development team to other projects.

The Kin TWOm was discontinued in August 2011;[11] unsold inventory could still be found for sale on deals sites as late as June 2013.

[19] Kin was developed inside Microsoft's Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) division by a group that included staff from Danger.

[21] The unveiling of Microsoft Kin began when the company sent out invitations to select reporters for a mystery event in San Francisco on April 12, 2010.

[22] The event was held in a night club called Mighty and featured a presentation given by Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Device division.

[23] Microsoft was criticized for an online video advertisement for the phone that depicted a male teenager putting a Kin under his shirt to photograph his naked chest.

Microsoft executives told The New York Times that they were dismayed that Verizon Wireless staff were not promoting the phones actively enough.

[35] Users could not adjust this interval,[36] although updates could be manually triggered with an on-screen refresh button, or locking then unlocking the phone.

[citation needed] Microsoft cited battery life and immature social networking APIs as reasons for the delay; Engadget speculated that Microsoft may have been using the delayed messaging to encourage Verizon to offer lower-priced data plans, which would be attractive to the platform's teenage target audience.

[38] Retweets, direct messages, viewing single person updates, and opening Twitter links from the Loop were also not supported.

[36] Spot was a feature that allowed users to add an e-mail address or telephone number to an SMS or MMS, or to attach content (e.g., text, URLs or photos) to emails.

Much like contemporaneous Zune devices, Kin phones could also stream music over a WiFi connection in addition to 3G on the carrier's network.

[42] For Mac users, Microsoft, in collaboration with Mark/Space, provided a media syncing tool that pulled audio and video files from iTunes and photos from iPhoto.

According to Microsoft, "Both KIN and Windows Phone share common OS components, software and services.

"[48] Microsoft said that the underlying fundamentals of Kin and Windows Phone were held together by similar core technologies.

Both operating systems ran the same Silverlight platform,[48] with Microsoft's stated intention being to eventually merge Windows Phone with Kin.

The new firmware on the repurposed "m" phones removed several data-centric features of the operating system, including many of the devices' social elements such as the Loop home screen, the Spot, and access to the Kin Studio cloud storage site, which was shut down in January 2011.

Users were also able to sync music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies to their Kin phones through the Zune software.

The "m" series added a calendar and a calculator application, to address complaints that these were missing functions that even the most basic feature phone typically has.

Other features missing on the original version continued to be absent, including disallowing Bluetooth access for file transfer and wireless printing.