Microsoft’s New Kin Phones: What You Need To Know

Well, Microsoft did tell us they were going to tell us something today.  And now they’ve told us.  It was not, as some had speculated, the near-mythological Microsoft Courier, a tablet computer.  Instead it was a new line of phones, oriented at the person who is deeply, deeply into social networking.

Says The Next Web:

Microsoft are quick to point out that this is a completely different offering from Windows Phone 7. Instead of being a smartphone with hundreds of different applications at your disposal, the Kin One and Kin Two exist to keep you in constant contact with friends whilst your on the move, sharing photos, videos and status updates on the go without an app store in sight.

Without a single app, the phone collects from the Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, and Myspace feeds of your contacts to populate your Loop, the basic home screen of the phone, and also allows you to view all of the aggregated info from their profiles.

• With the Spot, an actual, ever-present green dot, you can apparently share pictures, videos, and text with anyone in your network by dragging and tapping.
• The Studio is the web based client for the phone, where you can organize everything on it.  Every bit of media your phone creates, every text message, phone record, and contact, is geotagged with your location at the time they were created and backed up to the Studio.
• The phone allows for 3G music streaming, and is compatible with the Zune Pass.
• The browser is a version of Internet Explorer 7.
• There is no basic GPS map, no web video, no basic calendar, and according Gizmodo, it doesn’t access Facebook events.

The Kin One boasts a 320×240 screen, 5MP camera, and 4 gigs of memory.  The Kin Two has a bigger screen, 8MPs, and 8 gigs.  Both have full keyboards.

The Kin phones will be available in May from Verizon.

(via The Next Web and Gizmodo.)