14 DAY TRIAL // KIN One and KIN Two offer an excellent prelude to Microsoft’s next-generation Windows Mobile platform, namely Windows Phone 7. KIN, the social device of the Windows Phone family, is focused on delivering a comprehensive array of broadcasting and sharing capabilities that will not only simplify socializing, but also make it into a unique experience for a mobile phone. In this sense, with a “kinship” aura, KIN offers a prelude to what customers will be getting with Windows Phone 7 devices ahead of the 2010 holiday season. However, despite featuring many of the core concepts of Windows Phone 7, KIN is in a class all of its own.
“Thanks to a partnership between Microsoft, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and Sharp, KIN blends the best of the phone, online services and the PC with some great new experiences such as Loop, Spot and Studio. Social networking is built in to the fabric of the phone, making the people and stuff you love the focus. Constantly updated and bringing together feeds from Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, KIN puts everything and everyone you care about in one place. Sharing pictures, videos, links and status updates is easy and fast so you can stay connected. For music lovers KIN features a Zune experience,” Dominic Carr, director, Microsoft News Center, revealed.
There’s no way of putting this better than by stating the obvious, KIN One and KIN Two are social-networking devices with phone capabilities. Both phones are products of an extensive program designed to harvest user feedback from Project Muse. Microsoft literally interviewed thousands of people in order to get the pulse of an entire generation that had social networking as its main focus. The two products introduced on April 12, KIN One and KIN Two, have been developed under Project Codename Pink, and had their own codenames, namely Turtle and Pure.
“We knew we had created something pretty special when we saw the reactions we got to people from our initial prototype. And if you're into design or fashion, we had some people say, oh, gosh, KIN is couture software. It's hand-tailored, it's custom fit for generation upload, for those sociologists that I talked about. I suppose my favorite reaction was from a young woman who said, after seeing this, I feel like finally there's a phone that was designed for me,” Robbie Bach, president, Entertainment & Devices Division, noted.
Watch the video embedded below for the full unveiling of KIN One and KIN Two.
