14 DAY TRIAL // Announced back in August, Verzo's Kinzo Android smartphone is now available for purchase in the United States and Europe.
Although the company seems to have the right philosophy, the approach will surely fail given the phone's high pricing on both continents.
The Kinzo will be available for purchase starting today for 459 USD in the United States and 420 EUR in Europe, which seems severely overpriced.
First of all, the smartphone is delivered with Android 2.2 Froyo, which is an obsolete operating system, even though not all devices that were launched with this platform received the Gingerbread upgrade.
It looks like Verzo bets on its proprietary GUI (graphical user interface) more than on the operating system.
The user interface starts with the model Kinzo in its basic layout and features a modified main screen and the status icons. In addition, the GUI has its own weather widget, contacts visualization, background, as well as other more or less interesting features.
According to Verzo, the GUI is a work in progress and will continue to be developed based on the users' feedback.
Furthermore, the smartphone is equipped with a 1GHz single core processor and features a large 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen that supports 16 million colors and 480 x 800 pixels resolution.
The design of the Kinzo smartphone was done outside the Verzo company, in the Novague design studio. The phone measures 131.6 x 72.3 x 12.3mm and weighs 155g (battery included).
On the inside, the phone packs 512 MB of internal memory and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB, 8GB memory card included).
There's also a 5-megapixel rear camera and a secondary VGA front facing camera that will probably be used for video calls when the smartphone will receive the Gingerbread upgrade.
On the positive side, the Kinzo is delivered in a luxury package that contains some free accessories, including a genuine leather case, a very small USB charger, a car charger made of polished steel, quality headphones, and a car holder.