Brutal but true tech headlines: Facebook, Kinect, Droid X, Bumpers, more

- After recent lawsuits, no one is sure who really owns Facebook at this point. As opposed to MySpace, which no wants to admit owning.

- If the Facebook ownership lawsuits do turn out to be valid, then we all learned how to spell “Zuckerberg” for nothing

- Don’t worry, no one at Verizon knows what the “X” stands for in “Droid X” either.

- Microsoft Kinect to sell for $149. Even less, if you’re willing to take a free Kin with it.

- Amazon Kindle sales up in spite of iPad popularity, proving that 30% price cuts never hurt.

- Speaking of the Kindle, it’s surprising that Amazon hasn’t yet gotten around to suing Microsoft for using names like “Kinect” and “Kin” – though in the latter case it may simply be out of pity.

- Next time you manage to get a flashlight app approved with a hidden tethering feature built in, keep it to yourself.

- Why yes, “Bumpers” is in fact the dumbest name for a case ever.

- Question of the day: will BP change its name back to “Amoco” before AT&T changes its name back to Cingular?

Microsoft Kin canceled already: whatever it was, it didn’t last long

Whatever the Microsoft Kin was, it didn’t last long. The new phone, which Microsoft sent to market seemingly just days ago, has already been end of life’d as a separate product and instead folded into Microsoft’s Windows 7 phone team, which has been a long-running failure itself. The bizarre part is that the end of the Kin has come even as its initial run of television advertisements introducing the product to the public is still airing. And that’s before one considers the name “Kin” itself which was a beyond bizarre choice when one considers the popularity of Amazon’s Kindle.

When the Kin was first introduced, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber prophetically wrote “Microsoft Announces Kin, Its Next Two Failed Phones” – yet one has to wonder if even he expected it to disappear this quickly.

Microsoft Kinect is a naming diskinect

Microsoft has announced that its long-demoed “Project Natal” is in fact real and its commercial name will be Kinect, provoking two questions: huh? and double huh? After the small handful of people who had actually test out Natal swore up and down that the wireless gaming technology was actually real, which included the incredibly rare Microsoft innovation of removing the baton from the wii motif and allowing gamers to finally not have to hold anything in their hands, and largely not getting believed, it turns out Natal is apparently real after all. But the real head scratching comes when one examines the product’s new name: Kinect?

Okay, so it’s a bad misspelling of the word “connect” in that it forces you to slightly mispronounce an extremely common word just to say the name of the product. This is no surprise; with stinkers like Zune and Bing, it’s clear that Microsoft lost its way with product names awhile ago. It’s also part of a new brand name convention that the company is apparently attempting to build on, as the company is also launching a smartphone called the Kin. Get it? Kin? Kinect? Alright, makes sense. Except, oops, isn’t there some other product out there with a vaguely similar name, one that’s been on the market for a few years, and comes from a rival company? Ah yeah right, the Amazon Kindle. Even with its hard earned reputation of copycatting with the best of them, Microsoft’s launch of products called “Kin” and “Kinect” at a time when Amazon has an already well established gizmo called the “Kindle” is nothing short of stunning. It makes you wonder just what Amazon’s legal department might be thinking today as it weighs its options. It doesn’t take a legal expert to see how Amazon could argue that Microsoft is attempting to lure customers into thinking that its new Kin and Kinect are somehow kinected (sorry, couldn’t help it) to the existing Kindle platform.

The fact that “Kinect” is an uncomfortable name to try to say to begin with, combined with the fact that it may well (and arguably should) see legal action from Amazon, is unfortunate considering that gaming is the one area in which Microsoft is actually innovating, and that the Natal/Kinect technology could be the most innovative thing that Microsoft has brought to market since… well, maybe ever. That’s what happens when you spend three decades setting the bar so low for yourself. Not that the dumb name, or even a lawsuit, would keep Kinect from becoming a success – that’ll come down to how closely the actual real world user experience resembles the magical one we’ve seen demoed in tightly controlled environments.