Turns out all the leaked photos of Microsoft’s “Project Pink” phones were real. Targeted squarely at young “social” chatters looking to share their every waking moment with the world, the Kin One and Kin Two boast slide-out QWERTY keypads, Zune media players, multi-touch displays, and more social networking tools than you could shake a stick at. No app store, though.
Set for release in the “beginning” of May exclusively on Verizon Wireless (no pricing details or exact release dates yet), the Kin One and Two look like a combination of the T-Mobile’s old Sidekick sliders (which were developed by a company now owned by Microsoft) and Motorola’s new Motoblur service, which pushes an endless stream of Twitter, Facebook, Windows Live, and MySpace updates to Moto’s Android phones.
While the two new Kins run on an OS that’s based on the “same core elements” as Windows Phone 7, they’re not actually Windows Phone 7 handsets; instead, they’re both powered by a custom, pared-down OS that emphasizes social networking, music, and content sharing.
Both Kins are slider phones, but their respective form factors are slightly different. Kin One is shaped more like an oval, with a compact QWERTY keypad, a 5-megapixel camera, an LED flash, and SD video recording; the Kin Two has more of a traditional rectangular shape with a larger keypad and display, an 8MP lens, and full-on 720p video recording.
main event, though, is something called the Kin Loop: a tiled mash-up of status updates from your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pals (similar to the stream of updates you’d see on Motorola’s Motoblur-enabled phones), contacts, email and SMS alerts, recent photos and videos, you name it.
Sitting at the bottom of the display is a little green dot, called the Kin Spot, that lets you quickly share photos, videos, Web pages, and location info with any of your contacts; basically, you just tap and drag the content you want to share onto the Spot, then tap again to choose one or more contacts, or just tap to share with all your Facebook, Twitter, and/or MySpace buddie.
Another cool feature reminiscent of the old, cloud-based Sidekick is the Kin Studio, a snazzy personalized Web page that automatically backs up all your Kin contacts, photos, videos, and messages online, complete with a timeline that lets you “relive” your Kin events for any given month, week, or day. Of course, Microsoft will have to be careful to prevent any of the online meltdowns that plagued Sidekick users in October.
Gizmodo fills in several of the details missing from the Microsoft press release, such as storage capacity (4GB for the Kin One, 8GB for the Two, not expandable), processor (Nvidia Tegra for both handsets), and the inclusion of Wi-Fi support. But note, you won’t be able to install any apps on the Kins whatsoever. Huh.
Of course, the crucial detail we’re missing here is a price tag. Speculation is that the handsets won’t cost any more than $150 with a two-year Verizon contract. But given the fact that the Kins won’t have an app store, I’m thinking more like $99 for the Kin Two, $49 for the One. (The phones will also arrive in Europe this fall via Vodafone.)

Tags: Kin, Microsoft, Windows Phone 7

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