Microsoft’s Kin One, Kin Two Smartphones Coming to Verizon

by Nicholas Kolakowski

The Kin One features a sliding form-factor, a touch screen, a mono speaker tuned for speakerphone and 4GB of memory.

The Kin One also includes what Microsoft claims is a “compact keyboard for one-handed texting.”

The Kin One boasts a 5.0-megapixel embedded camera, with a dedicated camera button.

The Kin Two includes a long-form factor with sliding QWERTY keyboard.

The Kin Two utilizes an 8.0-megapixel camera, capable of shooting HD video.

The Kin Two includes stereo speakers. Neither the Kin One nor the Kin Two will feature Adobe Flash.

Both the Kin One and Kin Two feature a media player powered by Zune. Verizon will be the exclusive carrier in the U.S. of both devices.

Kin will feature local and Web search by Bing, along with an RSS feed reader to pull information from the Web.

Packaging for the Kin One and Kin Two.

The Kin phones home screen loops in feeds from social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, updating peoples status updates and messages.

The materials included with each Kin re-emphasize the devices young, socially-connected demographic target.

Kin Studio backs up texts, videos, contacts and other phone information into the cloud, allowing users to retrieve that data even if the phone becomes lost or damaged.