Microsoft Announces Kin One and Kin Two

4/12/10
vg$ Goal of thread: $1.25

Today, Microsoft announced their Kin One and Kin Two phones. Here's a smorgasbord of information from the event and of the newly announced phones. We will see how this will affect the launch of Windows Mobile 7 or if the two OS's will actually compliment one another.

Also, check out the newly launched kin website: http://kin.com/

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant (updated with video)

By Chris Ziegler posted Apr 12th 2010 1:01PM

It's finally official: Microsoft Pink -- the product of Redmond's acquisition of Danger -- has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger's Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they're ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it's a distinctly and totally different experience -- the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we're told it's based on the Zune's browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there's no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.

Kin One -- the phone we'd seen rumored as "Turtle" -- is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the "Pure," upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios.. For what it's worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn't a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that's entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone -- contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on -- and we've got to admit, it looks pretty slick. Keep reading after the break for a lot more info and video!

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two press shots

A big focus for Microsoft with Kin is the totally new, different, crazy UI, which is based on blocky, simple text, monochromatic elements, and zoomed-in, stylized pictures. The big two features unique to Kin are being called "Spot" and "Loop." Loop is sort of the Kin's home screen, aggregating social content from your friends (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) roughly based on order of priority by how you sort your contents, so you don't have to see as many updates from people you don't follow too closely. Spot, meanwhile, is an ever-present green dot at the bottom of the screen where you can drag content -- just about any content, be it maps, images, status updates, videos -- and share it with contacts. Think of it as an "Attach" button in your messaging client, but on steroids.

Both phones have full support for the Zune music and video experience (but not Zune gaming), and it looks like the Zune HD UI we're accustomed to, just as it does on Windows Phone 7. To loop in the Mac community, Microsoft will be offering a Mac-compatible music side-loader -- in other words, it won't be a true, native Zune client and you won't be able to use it to shop for music, but it'll happily connect to iTunes and sync your non-DRM collection. Both phones also support over-the-air firmware updates, so there'll be no need to tether just for that. Speaking of tethering, data tethering isn't supported.

Verizon is getting the Kin One and Two in the US in May, while Vodafone has signed on as the European partner for a Fall launch. We'll update you on specific pricing and availability just as soon as we have it.

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Microsoft Kin UI walkthrough

By Paul Miller posted Apr 12th 2010 2:32PM

If you've managed to pull your eyes away from our no-holds-barred liveblog of Microsoft's Kin announcement, you might've noticed that there are videos up on the official Kin site depicting the the UI in all its hipster-lite, storytelling glory. Still, in case you're not a 20 something living in Brooklyn on your parents' money while pursuing a career in the arts, we've turned those motion video picture things into regular stills for your staid perusal. We even added little descriptors below the galleries, which due to your acute lack of ADD you might even find time to read. We upped the videos after the break as well, just in case you wanted to try your hand at the young-and-hip life.

Kin Spot

Kin Spot is a little hot spot at the bottom of the screen almost akin the virtual "binding" in Courier. You can drag pictures, addresses, web pages, and other media into it, and then drag the faces of friends who you want to send the stack of stuff to. Once you tap the spot you can preview your message, add some text, and choose from MMS or email to send it out.

Haven't had enough? Check out our hands-on and the official announce post! Videos and the rest of the features are after the break.

Kin Loop

Kin Loop

Kin Loop is the home screen, which shares much in common with the Windows Phone 7 home, except for its primary focus on people. You can see updates from news sites, people, and photo sites, and update your own Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter from a little widget up top.

Kin Camera

Kin Camera

It's a camera, but of course it's also social. You can upload to social sites right from the app, and it mixes between video and stills pretty freely. There's also a pinch-to-zoom gesture for cropping photos while you're taking them.

Kin Studio

Kin Studio

Perhaps the biggest surprise or outside-the-box feature is Kin Studio. Basically, it lets you do everything you can do on your phone, like share your photos, update your status, etc. (even using a Kin Spot UI to do it), but it also acts as cloud storage for all your media -- including a scrubbable timeline for checking out your own archives. You can also do contact management from here, another nice perk.

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Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands-on!

By Chris Ziegler posted Apr 12th 2010 3:07PM

We've just spent some time handling Microsoft's just-announced Kin One and Kin Two, and we're not sure what to think; the keyboards have surprisingly good feel, particularly the One (think Palm Pre levels of usability on the One, for example -- we wouldn't be surprised if it was their benchmark) and the phones generally feel pretty solid. In fact, we'd go so far to say that this is a marked improvement in hardware quality for Sharp than any of its Sidekicks ever offered. Problem is, we just can't get over the fact that the software is extremely limited in its scope -- yes, we understand that it's by design, but does this so-called "upload generation" of socially-connected teens and twentysomethings really want a phone that they can't download games to? That's the million-dollar question that Verizon will be answering over the next few months, it seems.

We know that the One is positioned as the slightly lower-end device on account of its 5 megapixel cam (the Two has 8) and half the internal storage, but we actually came away liking it more -- it's the only one of the two that looks truly unique, because the Two just looks like any old landscape slider smartphone (not to say that's necessarily a bad thing). The front of both devices is graced with a single metallic button to offset an otherwise clean glossy black bezel -- this button functions as Back, not Home, so if you're multiple levels deep into the UI you'll only be taken back one. You can still hold the button down to get back to the home screen, fortunately, and both the One and Two have dedicated camera buttons -- Microsoft's making no secret of the fact that image and video capture are a huge push for these devices.

Follow the break for more thoughts, shots, and video!

Kin One UI hands-on

The basic meat-and-potatoes parts of the user interface -- the Loop, the Spot, and so on -- work pretty smoothly, without any hiccups. The browser stuttered in places, but it wasn't unusably bad; hopefully this is something that'll improve over time, since the Kins support over-the-air updates. Maybe our favorite part of the device, though, was Zune Pass, which streams over WiFi or 3G. Yes, you heard us right: you can search for and stream basically anything out of the Zune Pass collection over Verizon's EV-DO, then play it in the background while you go about your merry way. It worked really well, and the Zune UI seems to translate pretty well onto a display as small as the One's tiny QVGA unit.

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two first hands on

Kin One and Two hands-on part two

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Kin is basically a Zune HD inside, can go for a weekend on a charge

By Chris Ziegler posted Apr 12th 2010 6:43PM

In a discussion with Kin product manager Derek Snyder this afternoon, we've confirmed that both the Kin One and Kin Two are built on the same foundation as the Zune HD -- in other words, they're running NVIDIA Tegra silicon, and there's no reason that anything you see on a Zune HD couldn't run just as well on a Kin. Of course, that's a purely theoretical statement at this point since Zune apps don't work on Kin as it stands -- the platform's completely closed, though Microsoft has been insistent that we should keep a close eye on its over-the-air updates after launch as features evolve. Either way, that's a marked (and curious) departure from Windows Phone 7, where Microsoft's been taking an all-Qualcomm, all-the-time approach.

Realistically, we've gotten the impression today that Kin doesn't come close to tapping out a Tegra's horsepower, but that might be by design: Snyder also mentioned that a key goal of the development phase was to make sure that the phones could go a whole weekend without a charge. Running a Tegra at full bore 24 / 7 doesn't lend itself to miserly power consumption, so the overall simplicity of the UI -- and the lack of 3D gaming -- might play a role there. 

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I just saw that on engadget and was just baffled.

10 years+ to make their own phone and this is what they come up with? This is basically the same exact phone as the Tmobile sidekick which is almost a decade old by now.

I mean really, no apps? Did they miss the whole Iphone and clones thing? I mean even Blackberries have a ton of apps and an app store by now. The only way this is anywhere near a hit is if it costs 50 dollars or less subsidized by the carriers.

Just another underwhelming product announcement from Microsoft. At least when Apple throws these codenamed events they have...you know....something cool and successful to show there.

If they sell hundreds of thousands of these on launch day I'll be so surprised I might end up with a heart attack despite being in my 20s.

Or maybe I'm wrong and this will be brilliant and successful like the Zune has been (in other words 90th on the Amazon store behind dozens of Apple products and even a few products from Sandisk and other also rans like the Zune HD is).

Microsoft: Kin and Windows Phone 7 will share more technology over time

By Chris Ziegler posted Apr 12th 2010 8:26PM

Sure, Nokia's already proven that it's possible to commercially support multiple mobile platforms at a time, but is it really a great idea? Even Nokia ultimately ended up collapsing Series 80 and 90 in to S60 over the years, but Microsoft's going in a distinctly different direction by rolling out Kin and Windows Phone 7 at nearly the same time (plus the spectre of WinMo 6.x, which'll undoubtedly soldier on in some niche markets for years to come). While both products share common underpinnings, they're different enough so that there's really no user-facing commonality beyond some shared compatibility with services like Zune and Windows Live, and frankly, we don't get it -- why not start from a generic, extensible platform like Windows Phone 7 and work outwards to create Kin as a specialized sub-product?

We chatted with Microsoft GM Matt Bencke today to get a feel for why there isn't more technical synergy between two products that obviously share the overwhelming majority of their DNA, and basically, the Reader's Digest version of the conversation is that they intend to get there eventually. "We're going to share more and more in terms of code," he said -- though we weren't able to nail him down to a timeline for making that happen -- ultimately agreeing that it was fair to say you'd start to see the platforms converge over time. If we had to guess, Kin's suffering from the fact that it was approved and set in stone before Windows Phone 7 even existed in its current incarnation, and it's going to take Redmond a little while to get the projects synced. See the critical portion of the talk on video after the break.

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...what zune is to ipod,
kin is to iphone...

Nah Kin reminds of N97 + Iphone! Personally a big fan of N97, pity it is on a provider that I don't really like (bell canada).