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[Sidekick: Off] And Microsoft's Kin is On
Desert_Eagle25
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Registered User regular
Microsoft Kin Phone Series
If you guys haven't been following Microsoft's big announcement of their "Pink" devices, have faith, for I've been on top of it with no small thanks to Engadget keeping me in on the loop. So here's what you need to know:
Announcement:
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!
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. Additionally, the phone will have access to the Zune Pass, which will allow you stream music and videos from your phone, on the go. 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.
Demo Vids!:
Courtesy of Engadget.
Desert_Eagle25 on
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Plus the phones in the pics look rather small. The screen real estate is especially bad. I doubt little tiny text boxes will be that clear and readable at that size.
So am I missing something or is this just a weird move by MS?
Edit: The videos do make it look pretty cool, though.
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Won't you have to get a data plan
That or a mobile hot spot like a MyFi or Overdrive.
I know Verizon prices feature phones with a cheaper $10/15 data plan, so there's that. This is essentially going to compete against the Env3, Env Touch, Touch Chocolate, etc which are featurephones that now require dataplans. I know if I had a choice between the Env Touch or the Kin Two, I'd probably go for the Kin Two since it has Zune integration and looks to have a better interface than the Env would.
But since I don't have to make that choice and since WP7 will be out by the time I get my next upgrade, I'll just be jumping straight to it or Android..