In the 24 hours since the death of Microsoft's Kin, there have been so many postmortems analyzing what went wrong that it's easy to forget there were actually some things that the Microsoft did right with the phones ... at least in concept. At the top of my list: the Kin Studio.

OK, so this isn't actually a feature of the phone itself. Instead it's a cloud-based service, free to Kin users, that automatically synchronizes content from the phone to an online service, backing up pretty much everything on the phone -- photos, videos, messages, and other content -- and making it accessible in a timeline in a browser.

Even though I wasn't in Microsoft's target demographic of teens and young adults, this was the one Kin feature that truly resonated with me in the time I spent with the phones and the online service, during the Kin launch event and later in Verizon Wireless stores. Going through the process of emailing myself a photo from my iPhone this morning reminded me of the fact that synchronization of content remains a challenge for many mobile users.

I'm not the only one pointing this out. PC World also highlighted the Studio in its piece today on four Kin features worth keeping around -- a number that seems like a stretch to me, but underscores the possibility that maybe the Kin project wasn't quite the waste of time it might have appeared.

Of course, the Kin wasn't the first to take a shot at this kind of cloud-based mobile synchronization, but of all the features that the device brought to market, the Studio seems like it should be the first priority if Microsoft is to truly incorporate what it learned from the Kin project into future Windows Phone releases, as the company has promised.