Not even a whole two months removed from their announcing Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft is back today with another event in which it is expected to reveal its Project Pink line-up including the handsets known as the “Pure” and “Turtle”. Whether or not they’ll run WP7 or something else entirely isn’t clear, but all of this will soon be clear. As the event carries on we’ll be updating this post with the latest information, so be sure to check often lest you be left out of the loop. All of the goodness is after the jump.
And would you look at that, right as the event got underway KIN.com went live with all of the information about the new handsets.
KIN ONE
- Compact keypad for one-handed texting
- Multi-touch display
- 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and SD video recording
- Wi-Fi
- GPS
- External mono speaker
- 4GB internal memory (enough for 1,000 songs)
- Media powered by Zune
KIN TWO
- Horizontal sliding QWERTY keypad
- Multi-touch display
- 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and HD video recording
- Wi-Fi
- GPS
- External stereo speaker
- 8GB internal memory (enough for 2,000 songs)
- Media powered by Zune
Windows Phone 7 is about simplifying people’s lives, whereas KIN is all about amplifying people’s lives. It represents Microsoft “cranking social up to 11” for “people who live to be connected, share, express and relate to their friends and family.”
The homescreen of the KIN is known as the Loop, an always running and constantly updating portal into your social life with support for services like Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. You can customize Loop by adding your best friends to your favorites. This will ensure you see more frequent updates from your favorite people. Also found on the homescreen is KIN Spot, a little green dot where you can drag all of your favorite media content to share with friends and social media networks. The device’s browser is tightly integrated with the Spot so sharing an awesome BGR scoop with your friends couldn’t be more simple.
The KIN also comes with KIN Studio. “It’s your phone, online, on any web browser.” With KIN Studio, all of your call logs, texts, contacts images, videos, and more are stored in the cloud and viewable in a pretty nifty looking timeline. Pretty much everything you do on the KIN is compatible with geo-tagging, so if you forget where you were when you took a particular picture or video you can go online and refresh your memory thanks to the integration of Bing Maps.
The KIN ONE and TWO are the first Windows Phones to feature a full-fledged Zune experience. Music, video, podcasts, FM radio, you name it, the KIN’s got it (okay, no Zune gaming). Purchase yourself a Zune Pass subscription and you’re good to listen to millions of tracks on device or on your PC.
The KIN ONE and KIN TWO will go on sale with Verizon next month, while Vodafone will be offering the two devices across Europe in the Fall. Pricing has yet to be announced.
Definitely cool stuff, but the KIN line-up is not without huge, huge flaws. There is no support for third-party apps, the hardware looks to be pretty cheap and uninspired (the design could easily have been stolen from a Playmates Ninja Turtles toy circa 1989), and the displays are tiny. You know, two out of the three things that did Palm in in the past year.
Developing…
