There they are. The Kin One and Kin Two. Both aimed at young whipper-snappers (like myself). But this is a news report article, so let’s talk about the Kin series first. The Kin 1 (rumored as the “Turtle”), sports a QVGA screen, 5 megapixel camera, 4GB of built-in storage, a Zune music player, and a “one-handed” slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The Kin 2 (rumored as the “Pure”) contains an 8 megapixel camera for HD recording, HVGA screen, 8GB of memory (which cannot be expanded on either of the devices), two-handed QWERTY, and the KIN operating system which borrows many elements from Windows Phone 7, except all more social oriented, and supposedly fitted for use on the tiny screens.
Microsoft KIN Announcement Gallery
The main homescreen, called “The Loop” will make you go loopy at how all over the place it is, which raises some questions on to how usable these phones really are. The first things that you see are contacts, Twitter feeds, Facebook, etc. where you can easily tap on them for access to them. The Zune music player works exactly like a Zune music player, that is to say large fonts and lots of slow-motion but cool scrolling. Both phones will also work with the Zune Pass, so technically this is as close as a Zune Phone you’re going to get. Both phones launch in May on Verizon for an undisclosed price. These phones aren’t what you would call smartphone per se, but they are nice little feature phones which trick you into thinking they are. For example, both Kin phones don’t have a calendar app or an app store. You can check out the rest at Kin.com
Still I wouldn’t have any problems with reviewing them. Press release after the break, kiddies!
Oh, and I’d like to make it clear: “Kin” is not a cool name for a phone. But it’s very interesting.
See that thing up there? Yeah, that’s what you would call one of the two Microsoft Pink phones built by Sharp, called the Pure (above) and the Turtle (seen after the break). Both phones look like they’re headed to Verizon on April 20th, and are targeted at teens (like myself, I think) and 20-year-olds. Now I wonder which teen or young person in their twenties would want such a phone, but anyway they both seem to be feature phones, or in other words: cheap smartphones. Now there’s no word on what OS they’re running, but you can be sure it’s not Windows Phone 7, Zune HD UI, or the like. The sad looking Turtle is slowly waiting for you to crawl to it after the break.
With Mobile World Conference edging closer everyday, and evidence of Windows Mobile 7 creeping up on the blogs, a recent Zune software update (today) revealed the Zune.ini file, a file that associates hardware devices with the Zune driver, and inside of that file, 3 lines of code with the word “Phone” with vendor IDs and products IDs are locked to Microsoft. Almost every blog’s guess is that if the word “Phone” appears in a driver file for Zune devices, then a “Zune Phone” is coming? It could also be a Zune integration into a Project Pink phone, but who really knows? It’s a compelling find, isn’t it?
