The music section and playback screen feature prevalent album art, which keeps things visually appealing. The playback screen further offers shuffle, repeat, and "heart" soft keys; the latter let's you like or dislike songs for later sorting. You can listen to the songs through the integrated speakers, or with the included earbuds, which aren't terribly comfortable, but at least provide clear-sounding audio. On the whole, the player provided solid audio and smooth performance during testing, except for a minor glitch that prevented the audio from rerouting from the speakers to the headphones when they were plugged in during playback.
Restarting the phone once fixed the problem. Another distinctive feature of the Kin devices is the Web-based Kin Studio service. This is a bit like Microsoft's My Phone service for Windows Mobile, as it automatically backs up your phone's contacts, text messages, and multimedia files to a secure Web site for free.
When you log on to the Kin Studio Web site and enter your Windows Live ID and password, all your information will be there, including a current version of your Loop screen, any news feeds, and call logs. There's also a Timeline feature, which is pretty awesome, as it opens up all the photos, all the people you've been in touch with, and all the messages you've received for a designated time period and places them in a timeline.
Aside from the obvious physical variations, there are a couple of other differences between the Kin One and Two. Also, the Two has an 8-megapixel camera--the One's is 5 megapixels--and can shoot HD video. A in New York using Verizon service and call quality was decent. Despite some slight background hissing, we could hear our callers just fine and had no issue using an airline's voice-automated response system.
Most of our friends didn't have much to say about the audio quality one way or the other, but a couple of them mentioned that we sounded a bit muffled. The Kin Two's speakerphone was louder than the Kin One's, so it was easier to have a conversation even if we were in a noisier environment, but the audio sounded hollow.
The Kin's browser is a bit clunky to navigate: though it's easy to refresh or favorite a site, it's hard to figure out how to do anything else within the browser, and there's no support for Flash or multiple windows. However, the Kin Two's larger display definitely made the browsing experience better than it is on the Kin One. The Kin Two has a better camera than the Kin One, but the photo quality was pretty disappointing for an 8-megapixel shooter.
Images had a soft quality to them and colors were pretty washed out. In addition, our recorded HD video looked more like standard definition. It's not like we were expecting the phone to be a power device, but we noticed some delays when switching screens and launching apps. Speaking of which, there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary transition screens when opening apps.
Aside from the slight delays, we didn't have any problems or crashes that required us to reset the device. The Kin Two features a 1,mAh lithium ion battery with a rated standby time of 9. The Kin Two fared better in our battery drain tests , providing 5. Bonnie Cha. Pricing Not Available. The Good The Kin Two offers easy access to contacts and social-networking sites. The Kin devices are the first Windows phones to feature the Zune multimedia experience, including Zune Pass.
The Web-based Kin Studio backs up all of your phone's data. No calendar app or IM clients. Interesting, then, that aside from the shape, the only differentiating factors between the two phones are specs. The taller Kin has a x screen, like the iPhone, while the lil' baby Kin has a x screen, lock in a single, wide orientation.
Both cameras have LED flash. So, this OS. This OS! It's one of the more exciting pieces of software I've seen in a while, if simply because of how new it is.
Not new like, hey, look, there's a new version of a thing I've seen before, but more like hey, look, there's a new version of th—what the hell? Kins are labeled as a Windows Phone, but bear little resemblance to Windows Phone 7, and none at all to Windows Mobile. And yeah, it is a separate platform from Windows Phone 7. Actually, that's a bit inaccurate—it's not really a platform, since it doesn't have apps.
The interface is heavily paneled, but the panels can be all kinds of things. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook items! Throw your screen from side to side and you move between a homescreen with links to obvious functionality, The Loop, which is a collection of social networking feeds combined with RSS feeds, and your Favorites. Humans, not sites. Though you can peg website shortcuts to your homescreen. No point overexplaining this stuff—this is how it's used:. And yes, the concept does work.
The Kins are messaging phones centered not around texts, but around the services young people actually use nowadays.
It prompts you to sync with Twitter, Facebook and Myspace immediately, which it fairly intelligently gleans for contact information. It's like WebOS in this respect. Once you've got everything loaded up, your entire phone is basically overrun with social chaff, be it Twitter updates, friends' Facebook albums, or items from the surprisingly competent RSS feed reader.
Photos are slurped down from the cloud, and populate virtually every screen you see. Twitter updates are suspended above cropped photos of your friends, all jammed together in ill-fitting chunks. It's hectic, but it works. The Spot, a little dot on the bottom of the screen that you can drag just about anything into, is a helpful shortcut for sharing news, photos or whatever, and a fair—though not perfect—replacement for a lack of copy and paste.
When you dive a little deeper, you'll find more to like. Using the Zune app on a Kin is basically like using a misshapen Zune, by which I mean it's fast, sensible and, well, decent. With the Zune pass, its catalog is infinite. And beyond the features you can see and interact with on the handset itself, there's the Kin's killer app: Studio.
It's basically a blown-up version of your phone, with all its contents, accessible via a web interface. Uploads are automatic and nearly constant, so when you log on, your stuff is just there. More on this later. Microsoft's got a healthy concept here, for sure.
The Kin isn't a smartphone, but it sure had a monthly cellphone plan priced like one. At launch, the palm-sized Kin One -- which had a 2. Sounds cheap right? Not really. The fine print is in the monthly cellphone plan for the device.
All Kin phones require a data plan. For someone flipping burgers at McDonald's for their summer job, that's a lot of money to be handing over to a cellphone company. If only Microsoft had offered all those social networking features on the Kin without requiring a data plan, Kin might have had a better shot at survival.
Kin phones have a browser and can access social networking sites through widgets. But Microsoft crippled the overall functionality of the device by not allowing apps or games on the phone.
When asked about this, Microsoft said it really wanted to nail down the social aspects first, so some features had to be sidelined. However, both the Kin One and Two are built to support over-the-air updates, and the company didn't rule out adding these capabilities in the future. Among the several unique features that the Kin One has to offer is a media player that is anything but standard. Along with the Kin Two, this stout slider is the first Windows phone to come with a fully integrated Zune HD interface, which we daresay is a considerable step up from the Windows Media Player app found on previous products.
As on the standalone player, navigation is handled entirely via the touch screen and the tactile back button, and it's a very smooth process despite the Kin One's significantly smaller screen.
Media is also organized in the Zune HD manner, with the main screen dedicated to five categories: music, videos, radio, Zune Pass, and settings. Unsurprisingly, photos are separated out because of their relation to the phone's camera feature.
The top screen also features a graphically intense margin of "pins," playback history, and recently added content. This video illustrates this area better than we could ever describe it in words. Delving into the various menus on the Kin One's Zune player reveals a simple radio with autoscan and presets; a straightforward video player; and music organized handily into artist, album, genre, song, and playlist subcategories. The music section and playback screen feature prevalent album art, which keeps things visually appealing.
The playback screen further offers shuffle, repeat, and "heart" soft keys; the latter let's you like or dislike songs for later sorting. You can listen to the songs through the integrated speakers, or with the included earbuds, which aren't terribly comfortable, but at least provide clear-sounding audio.
On the whole, the player provided solid audio and smooth performance during testing, except for a minor glitch that prevented the audio from rerouting from the speakers to the headphones when they were plugged in during playback.
Restarting the phone once fixed the problem. Another distinctive feature of the Kin devices is the Web-based Kin Studio service.
This is a bit like Microsoft's My Phone service for Windows Mobile, as it automatically backs up your phone's contacts, text messages, and multimedia files to a secure Web site for free.
When you log on to the Kin Studio Web site and enter your Windows Live ID and password, all your information will be there, including a current version of your Loop screen, any news feeds, and call logs. There's also a Timeline feature, which is pretty awesome, as it opens up all the photos, all the people you've been in touch with, and all the messages you've received for a designated time period and places them in a timeline.
Aside from the obvious physical variations, there are a couple of other differences between the Kin One and Two. Also, the Two has an 8-megapixel camera--the One's is 5 megapixels--and can shoot HD video. A in New York using Verizon service and call quality was a bit mixed. On our end, callers sounded loud and clear with little to no voice distortion or background noise.
We also had no problem interacting with an airline's voice-automated response system. However, several friends complained that our voice sounded low and robotic. We didn't encounter the volume problem on voice calls, but it was an issue with speakerphone calls. It was fine if we were in a quiet room, but if there was any background noise at all, we had a hard time hearing our callers even with volume set to the highest level.
The Kin's browser is a bit clunky to navigate; though it's easy to refresh or favorite a site, it's hard to figure out how to do anything else within the browser, and there's no support for Flash or multiple windows.
The Kin One's 5-megapixel camera took mediocre pictures. As we mentioned before, the weird placement of the capture button made it really hard to get a sharp image; though it has flash and lighting settings, the color still looked a bit faded.
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