Hasta La Gadget!

Some leaked literature suggests that Verizon will continue selling Microsoft’s discontinued Kin phones this year. But perhaps this isn’t as surprising as some publications have made it seem.

Spotted by PPCGeeks, the below screengrab purportedly shows Verizon’s Q4 roadmap. The Kin One and Kin Two, which were discontinued just weeks after their launch in June, sit at the bottom of the chart.

Microsoft declined to comment today. Some publications have interpreted the screengrab as evidence that the Kin is “returning” to Verizon, but in actuality Microsoft never said Verizon was abandoning the Kin in the first place.

In fact, Microsoft’s June statement clearly said Verizon would continue selling Kin phones:

Microsoft has made the decision to focus on the Windows Phone 7 launch and will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned.  Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases.  We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.

To be clear, Microsoft did discontinue the Kin, and that means the company is not going to invest further in developing new Kin phones. That doesn’t mean it halted all sales of existing Kin units. It appears Verizon is just clearing out inventory.

When I visited Microsoft about a month ago, the designers behind the Kin project made no indication of a possible revival of the Kin. Rather, they described the Kin as an important learning experience for developing Windows Phone 7.