Microsoft Kin Could Be Coming To AT&T, T-Mobile, Other Carriers

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The Microsoft Kin 1 and Kin 2 smartphones received a lot of attention and a lot of people seem to anticipate them. Publicly, the phone is heading to Vodafone in Europe and Verizon Wireless in the US – but the phone’s code has betrayed it as some careful code hunters have discovered hints to other carriers.

MobileCrunch is reporting that a ROM hacker known as “Conflipper” was digging around in the Kin OS and discovered lots and lots of provisioning files for other popular mobile phone carriers. They include, but aren’t limited to, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in the United States. In the UK, O2 UK, Orange and Vodafone were listed as well.

These provisioning files are basically bundles of settings to help a phone run on various networks. As you can imagine, despite the exclusivity contracts – this is fueling speculation that the little Microsoft Kin phones are on their way to multiple carriers.

Since the Kin OS ROM isn’t the official release software, it’s possible that these were just included in pre-release to test the phones on multiple networks, with speculation suggesting that perhaps Microsoft was shopping the phones to the multiple carriers. This definitely isn’t a slam-dunk confirmation that the Kin 1 and 2 are coming to other carriers (than Verizon and Vodafone)

Here’s the full list of carriers found in the provisioning files:

• In the US, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon.
• In Canada, Fido.
• In China, China Mobile and China Unicom.
• In Germany, O2, T-Mobile and Vodafone.
• In Spain, Vodafone.
• In France, Vodafone.
• In Portugal, Vodafone.
• In Italy, Vodafone.
• In Japan, Softbank and DoCoMo.
• In Sweden, Telia and Three
• In UK. Vodafone, O2 and Orange.