Move over BlackBerry, there’s a new youth-friendly messenger phone in town and it’s called the Kin – well, the Kin One and Two to be precise. Keen to impress the kids, Microsoft and Sharp have created a bunch of phones packed full of social networking goodness, Qwerty keypads and capacitive touchscreens.
The Kin One is smaller than the Kin Two and features a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash and 4GB of memory. The Kin Two boasts a larger keypad and touchscreen, 8GB of memory and an 8-megapixel camera (also with LED flash) that can shoot HD video. The video below is from Microsoft.
Both Kins run a Windows Phone 7 variant and allow users to save and share content easily. From what we can see Microsoft has created some interesting services: Kin Loop brings together feeds from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter in one place. Kin Spot allows you to drag content such as pictures and video to ‘the Spot’ and then share it with friends. Kin Studio automatically backs up your texts, call history, photos, videos and contacts, and dumps them online so that you can access/share it on the internet.
Microsoft has also added Zune experience – music, video, FM radio and podcast playback – and a Zune Pass subscription, which combined with Zune software on a PC will allow you to listen to songs from Zune Marketplace on your Kin. Click on the next page for more info and pictures.
The Kin One is a pebble-shaped slider phone with a touchscreen and full Qwerty keypad. It reminds us of the Palm Pre a bit.
The Kin Two is larger than its sibling and most likely heavier. We prefer the keyboard layout to the Kin One’s. This could be a winner.
Aww isn’t it cute.
That spot at the bottom of the screen is ‘the Spot’ where you can drag pictures and other content to to share it.
The Kin One and Two look smooth. We hope to touch them soon.
Overall the Kin One and Two look like nice phones but there are a few odd omissions from the Microsoft presentation this evening: What about GPS? Does it support apps? Is there an on-screen keypad? Will youths be able to IM each other? We’ll let you know as soon as we find out.
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