Microsoft's Kin phones: Compelling, if with some compromises

May 6, 2010 2:44 PM

Microsoft's Kin One, left, and Kin Two

First, the fuss; now the phones. Following a marketing campaign in which we questioned a promotional video and Microsoft subsequently edited it, we’ve now received press samples of two Microsoft-branded phones, the Kin One and Kin Two, designed for youthful (15 to 30-year-old) social networkers.

Both phones, made by Sharp, will be available from Verizon on May 13th for $50 and $100, respectively, with a two-year contract and after rebates. They require a $30 per month data plan on top of voice service. And most users will probably want add a text-messaging plan ($5 to $20 per month). Both Verizon and Microsoft officials declined to say what operating system these phones run on, though it's rumored to be Danger, the Sidekick OS Microsoft purchased two years ago.

The tiny, square-shaped Kin One, which measures 3.25 inches high x 2.5 inches wide inches, has 2.6-in. capacitative (multitouch) display, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5-megapixel camera with an LED for stills and video, and 4GB of storage. The larger, rectangular Kin Two, measuring 4.25 inches x 2.5 inches x .75 inches, generally provides more of everything, including 3.4-inch touch screen, a wider slide out QWERTY keyboard, 8GB of storage, and an 8-megapixel camera that can shoot HD-quality (720P) video. Both phones, thanks to their keyboards, are a chunky 0.75 inches thick.

A main attraction is the Kin interface they share, and an innovative feature called Kin Studio that automatically backs up content online. I’ll blog on those shortly. Meantime, some other highlights of the phones themselves:

Placing calls is simple enough. Both Kins have a button on their keyboards for launching the phone, regardless of what mode you're in. And the virtual keypad that pops up is sufficiently large for pecking out numbers with few mistakes. But the Kins lack a list of recently dialed numbers, a handy and fairly common feature on most touch-screen phones.

Keyboards: The smaller is the better. Though the Kin Two’s keyboard is bigger, I found the Kin One's more ergonomic. The dark keys are adequately spaced and stand out nicely against the white background. The Kin Two’s keys are also well-spaced, but they could have been larger given the keyboard's large amount of unused surface area.

The music player = Zune lite. There’s a Zune-player interface, but you can't purchase songs over the air; you must sideload them from a computer. You can, however, put songs in your phone's shopping cart for later purchase, and also stream music from the Zune marketplace if you have a Zune Pass (which I didn't have). There’s also an FM radio.

The cameras are well-equipped. Though they differ in megapixels, both Kin cameras have an LED flash, anti-shake, auto-focus, and geotagging (which uses GPS to note where the photo or video was taken). But they lack many other controls, such as white balance and special effects, that are common on most camera phones with 3 or more megapixels. Both Kins have a dedicated button for launching the camera application, which you can also use to snap pictures and start or stop video recording. I found the latter feature awkward to use on the Kin Two. It's hard to press the button without pushing open the sliding keyboard. But both cameras do also provide virtual buttons for taking pictures and movies.

We'll have more on the Kin twins after they pass through our labs. In the meantime, check out our recently updated Ratings of new cell phones.

—Mike Gikas