Microsoft KIN TWO

Share your passions, happy accidents, and triumphs with the Microsoft KIN TWO, a new kind of mobile phone that enables you to share more of your world with the people who matter the most. Offering a larger screen and keyboard than its sibling the KIN ONE, the KIN TWO also offers more memory, a higher resolution camera, and the ability to record high-definition video. The Microsoft Kin Two looks like a smartphone, and it's priced like a smartphone, but it isn't a smartphone.

Size and weight:

At 4.25 by 2.5 by .75 inches (HWD) and 4.7 ounces, the Kin Two looks like a traditional sliding smartphone. Slide the screen sideways to get a four-row QWERTY keyboard with well-separated keys. The phone is good-looking, but some of the buttons are awkwardly placed on the curve of the body; I had trouble pressing the camera and volume buttons accurately sometimes.

Network and connectivity:

Networking features are 2G Network (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) & 3G Network (HSDPA 900 / 2100). And connectivity features are GPRS 9Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps), EDGE (Class 10, 236.8 kbps), 3G (HSDPA 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA 2 Mbps), WLAN Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g), Bluetooth (v2.1 with A2DP), USB (microUSB v2.0).

Memory and Display:

Powered by Windows Phone OS for KIN, the KIN TWO features a 3.4-inch QVGA (480 x 320) capacitive touchscreen display that's complemented by a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from the side of the phone. The display can also show 16M colors. The Kin Two packs an impressive 8GB of on board storage, which is room for about 2000 songs that the user can play through its built in Zune media player. Unfortunately, there isn’t a SDcard slot on the Kin Two – so users will have to make do with 8GB. It also has a 256 MB of RAM.

Camera and Video:

The Kin Two's 8-megapixel camera includes a flash and geotags photos with your location (even indoors), but I had real trouble getting non-blurry photos out of it. Part of the problem is the extremely poorly-placed camera button. If you put one finger on the button and the other finger on the other side of the phone, as is natural, you're covering the camera lens. The alternative is to move one of your hands, and then the camera wobbles a lot. When I did, rarely, get a sharp picture, it was bright, clear, and free of artifacts—I wish I had been able to take more. I had better results with the Kin Two's 720p video camera, which took smooth if somewhat blown-out videos.

Entertainment Features:

Under an icon marked "Music & More," you can access a full set of Zune functions, and they work just like a Zune. To get music and video on or off the Kin, you sync it with the Zune Player on a PC or with upcoming Mac software that Microsoft pledges to make available soon. I found music, videos, podcasts and photos synced two ways, and they sounded good both over wired and Bluetooth headsets. Even HD videos played well, scaled down to the Kin Two's screen size. The KIN TWO is the first Windows Phone to feature a Zune-powered music and video experience, which also provides FM radio and podcast playback. With a Zune Pass subscription and Zune software on your PC, you can listen to millions of songs from Zune Marketplace on your KIN while on the go or load from your personal collection. The Kin Two features what Microsoft calls the Kin Loop, which is basically all the users’ social networking sites consolidated onto their home screen. In addition to this, users will be able to prioritise their favourites, so they can make sure only certain people get certain things. The Kin Two also includes Spot, located at the bottom of the home screen, which is essentially a portal where users can simply drag content into – be it a video, web link, or email – and it’ll share it with the users on their favourites. The media player supports MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+, MP4/WMV/H.264/H.263.