Archive for April 12th, 2010

Microsofts Project Pink phones now official, known as “Kin 1? and “Kin 2?

We’re live in San Francisco, where Microsoft has at long last unveiled the project previously known around the Internets as “Pink”, which they’ve now given the name “Kin”.

So what is Kin? Much like the rumor mill had projected, it’s two different social-network oriented phones: Kin 1, and Kin 2 (How very Seuss of them). Kin 1 is the phone previously known as “Turtle”, a little palm (as in the body part, not the company) sized portrait QWERTY slider with a 5 megapixel camera. Kin 2 was previously known amongst the whisperers as “Pure”, and is a landscape QWERTY slider with an 8 megapixel camera. Both phones are launching exclusively on Verizon in May.

Pictures incoming as soon as possible. Read on for all the details we’ve got so far.

The phones are very much the culmination of Microsoft’s purchase of Danger in 2008. According to three reps we asked, they are not based on Windows Phone 7, and instead use a Silverlight-based platform built from the ground up for these devices. They’re not exactly what we’d call “smartphones” – and Microsoft’s not pitching them as such. There’s no application store as far as we’ve seen. As we predicted back in October, it appears to be lacking a handful of features that folks might expect, including instant messaging and calendar functionality.

The entire platform focuses around two features: The Loop, and The Spot. “The Loop” is your 3 pane homescreen: one pane is your news/social feed, one is your contacts page, and the last is where you access things like the phone and the browser. “The Spot” is a small circle at the bottom of the screen which you use to share content with your social network; you drag things from your feed (or the browser, texts, etc) into “The Spot”, and then drag over which contacts/networks you want to share that data to.

Similar to the Sidekick series, just about everything you do on the phone is auto-synced to the cloud, from pictures to videos to text. This cloud backend is browser based, and as such should be completely cross platform.

The website where you’ll be able to see all your images and video in a timeline is Kin.com, which is up now.

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NYT claims Google’s CEO spoke of Android-powered Apple iPad competitor

According to the New York Times, Google’s CEO was recently overheard speaking of a new Android powered iPad competitor. The Times’ sources confirm that the device exists.

Read the full story here.

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Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant (updated with video)

It’s finally official: Microsoft Pink — the product of Redmond’s acquisition of Danger — has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger’s Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they’re ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it’s a distinctly and totally different experience — the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we’re told it’s based on the Zune’s browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there’s no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.

Kin One — the phone we’d seen rumored as “Turtle” — is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the “Pure,” upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios.. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn’t a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that’s entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone — contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on — and we’ve got to admit, it looks pretty slick. Keep reading after the break for a lot more info and video!

Continue reading Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant (updated with video)

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant (updated with video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Apr 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm is up for sale, says Bloomberg

We’ve been reporting for about a week now on a couple of rumors indicating that various companies are circling around Palm with possible intent to buy, and it looks like it all might be coming to a head.

Bloomberg is reporting that Palm has officially put it self up for sale, with their sources confirming the previous rumors that both HTC and Lenovo are considering making the buy. Another name mentioned: Dell — but according to the same sources, Dell has already backed out.

This next week should be mighty interesting for the folks in Sunnyvale. Stay tuned for more as we hear it.

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Apple outs WebKit2 browser for smartphones

Yesterday Apple announced WebKit2, a new API layer for its WebKit browser that is used on a number of smartphone platforms. WebKit2 was designed from the ground up and supports a “split process model,” which means web content is processed separately from the user interface. Google’s Chrome browser users a similar approach. WebKit2 is not ready for primetime production just yet but developers can begin tooling with it.

Read the full story here.

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