Microsoft came out with their own mobile KIN

Finally, the much rumored Microsoft's Project Pink phones saw day light officially at an event held at San Francisco. Microsoft has introduced new KIN handsets which are based on Windows Phone and designed specifically for social media enthusiasts. Tagging these new touchscreen handsets as Windows Phone, the new KIN One and KIN Two, these are same two Pink phones which were spotted last year in September. KIN One is a the Turtle Pink phone while KIN Two is the Pure model. KIN phones will be available exclusively from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. beginning in May and will be available through Vodafone in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom in Autumn.

Zune phone, Pink phone and what not have been the code names for these new KIN phones. Microsoft pushes KIN as new Windows Phone with a take on social networking features and hence is referred to as a social phone targeted at young users. Both phones have the OS based on Windows Compact Edition which is the core of Windows Phone 7 mobile OS as well. Designed for the social experience, KIN features new user experiences - Loop, Spot and Studio. KIN Loop is the home screen of the phone just like many other smartphones with widgets on the home screen. Loop connects the user's third party services account on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to keep them always updated. Users can select their favorite people and the Loop interface will show all latest updates from those folks.
KIN Spot is like a sharing sandbox where users can share text messages, photos, videos, location and even status updates. All these elements need to be simply dragged and dropped in a single place called Spot. KIN Studio is a cloud based service that backs up the text messages, call history, contacts, photos and even videos automatically to the cloud servers by KIN Studio. Enough storage is promised so that users never run out of space.

Both new KIN Phones have touchscreen and QWERTY keypads with curvaceous and glossy body metrics. One interesting feature which both phones share is the Zune media player embedded in the core supporting Zune music as well as video. No support for Zune gaming yet, but we can expect it to arrive later. These phones have built-in FM radio but it's not the HD radio like the one in Zune HD. For Mac users, Microsoft will offer special application to load music from Mac systems
(no it's not a Mac version of Zune software).

KIN One is curvy squared slider and appears like a stretched Palm Pre. One features 5.0 megapixel camera with LED flash and is also capable of recording SD Video. KIN One comes with 4 GB internal memory and has mono speaker. On the other hand, the KIN Two is like a slide out phone with full QWERTY keypad and has sports an 8.0 megapixel camera with LED Flash capable of shooting HD video. Two phone has 8 GB internal memory and comes with stereo speakers. Both the phones have dedicated keys for emoticons and Bing Search.

Neither of the phones carries any link or setting that connects to Zune Marketplace or any App market. There are no plans to introduce any sorts of apps for KIN devices. Also the firmware updates will be downloadable over-the-air and no data-tethering is offered. Big boo-boo for SanDisk as neither of the devices sports microSD card slots.


Microsoft hasn't shared any details on the pricing of this phone and we'll update this space as soon as we get to know it.