Microsoft announces Kin One and Kin Two messaging devices

Smartphones running Windows Phone 7 may not be on sale yet, but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from announcing another mobile platform that will be in the shops before then.

It’s called ‘Kin’ (yes, we’ve heard all the jokes by now) and there are two models — the Kin One and Kin Two. Both have two-part designs with slide-out Qwerty keyboards, but different shapes — the Kin One is a vertical slider that looks a bit like a squat Palm Pre, while the Kin Two has a more traditional horizontal sliding case. Both devices are manufactured by Sharp.

According to Microsoft, Kin is a smartphone for “generation upload”, which apparently means younger users who like to keep in touch with friends via social networking services and shared multimedia.

To that end, the Kin home screen consists of a Windows Phone 7-like tiled interface called ‘Loop’ that aggregates text messages, emails and social network updates from your friends. And by ‘friends’, Microsoft means any online contacts, but built-in support for friend categories means that you can segregate real life friends from Facebook acquaintances, and so on.

In addition to Loop, the other key feature to Kin is the ‘Spot’ (no, not that one) — a green dot that sits at the bottom the screen for everything you do. Anything dragged to this screen — images, messages, web sites — is stacked and can be pushed out in one go to your friends by whatever contacts methods you have for them.

At the launch presentation, Microsoft also reckoned that getting photos off phones was a big problem for many people — though we can’t see “generation upload” worrying about it. Its solution is an automatic cloud-based service called Kin Studio that tracks your activities via your geotagged photos. This presents a timeline that shows your snaps along with location data, as a kind of photo journal cum Flickr account — a neat idea for anyone that can’t otherwise be bothered to deal with a photo-archiving site manually.

Although the UI shows clear influences from Windows Phone 7, it’s not clear if Kin runs Windows Phone 7 or some other incompatible variant — one report reckons that the operating system is purpose-built and based on Silverlight. Regardless, Kin isn’t a smartphone in the strictest sense but more of a mobile messaging device, much like the Sidekick (although hopefully Microsoft will do a better job of managing the cloud-based backups).

Here are a couple of hands-on videos:

The Kin One and Kin Two will launch in the US in May and in the UK, with Vodafone, later this year. There’s no word on pricing yet, or exact specifications, but you can see more information about both models at the official Kin site.