KIN: 2 new phones from Microsoft

Microsoft has just announced the release of two new KIN phones. The most interesting thing is that the phones are positioned as FeaturePhones for children. The main purpose of the phones is the exchange of short messages and other social content. In a word, everything is for SOCIALITY and “friends-friends-friends”.

Almost everything I managed to find out today, + a bunch of photos and videos under the cut.

general information

• The phones will go on sale in May at Verizon and fall at Vodafone;
• Microsoft just tweeted that the phones will be available in Germany, Spain and Italy in the fall;
• Bluetooth
• Iron from Sharp;
• Sold in cylindrical boxes;

Specifications

	KIN ONE	KIN TWO
Keyboard	Small one-handed input	For two-handed input
Touchscreen	QVGA 320x240	HVGA 640x240
Camera	5 mpx, flash	8 mpx, flash, shoots HD video
Sound	Built-in mono speaker	Stereo speakers for watching videos without headphones
Memory	4 gb	8 gb

Phone Chips

Green button

The “pimp” at the bottom of the screen works like a container of content that you want to share. Drag and drop there a page on the Internet, a photo or video and you can immediately send it to Facebook, by e-mail, mms, etc.
Gallery UI green button.
Also on the keyboard there is a special button with a smiley (Why no one thought of it before ?!)

Loop

Loop - the home screen of the phone, which collects statuses from social networks such as Facebook, twitter, etc. Another thing is interesting, it shows more information about those people who are most interesting to you.
Gallery Loop UI.

On the cloud

Everything that happens on the phones is automatically transferred to the cloud. For this, Microsoft developed a special KIN studio.

* All this beauty on Silverlight.
KIN Studio Gallery.

KIN camera

The camera is “imprisoned” for immediately sending photos and video content to social networks.
Gallery UI KIN cameras.

Bing

The UI has a built-in Bing search that searches both globally and locally.

Zune

Phones have fully inherited all the features of Zune. Microsoft even announced that you no longer need Zune if you fit in 4 or 8 gigabytes.

Photo

• Engadget pictures
• Photos engadgetovtsev, part two

Video

• Overview roller
• Movie about KIN studio
• Once again about the studio
• Loop movie (homescreen)
• Demo camera
• Traveling with KIN
• Kin parade
• KIN at the party

References

• The site www.kin.com is already available .
• Presentation still ongoing has already ended in san francisco
• The official Twitter of the project also began to broadcast .
• www.facebook.com/KIN

What is missing

• IM Twitter and all that, of course, is convenient. + SMS has not been canceled. But there is no ICQ, no jabber or messenger on the phones.
• There is no third-party API or SDK .
• There is no GPS - but what about all this talk about social geo? Apparently, Microsoft will later declare, like Apple, that it will seek a position on cell towers.
• There is no calendar.
• And no sensible way to share your photo on twitter.