Microsoft’s Pink project was finally revealed today. Consisting of two phones called the KIN One and KIN Two, the two focus heavily on social media and are “designed specifically for people who are actively navigating their social lives.”
“Working closely with our partners, we saw an opportunity to design a mobile experience just for this social generation – a phone that makes it easy to share your life moment to moment,” said Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft. “We built KIN for people who live to be connected, share, express and relate to their friends and family. This social generation wants and needs more from their phone. KIN is the one place to get the stuff you care about to the people you care about most.”
The KIN One is the more compact device with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard designed for one-handed texting. It comes with a touchscreen 320 by 240 display, 4GB of internal memory, a 5MP camera with flash, a mono speaker.
The KIN Two is a more traditional QWERTY slider. It comes with a touchscreen 480 by 320 display, 8GB of internal memory, an 8MP camera with flash, and stereo speakers.
Both will run on Nvidia’s Tegra platform and have 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Both feature a Zune-like interface. The home screen is called The Loop and features updates and news gets aggregated.
KIN automatically brings together feeds from leading Microsoft and third-party services such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter all in one place, making it easier to stay connected. Customers can also select their favorite people, and KIN will automatically prioritize their status updates, messages, feeds and photos. Another unique feature, the KIN Spot is a new way for people to share what’s going on in their world. It lets them focus first on the people and stuff they want to share rather than the specific application they want to use. Videos, photos, text messages, Web pages, location and status updates are shared by simply dragging them to a single place on the phone called the Spot. Once all the people and content are in the Spot to share, the consumer can choose how to share, and start broadcasting.
Pricing was not disclosed but the Kin should be available starting in May from Verizon and from Vodafone in Europe in the fall.