Microsoft has announced two new touch-screen smartphones yesterday, dubbed the Kin One and Kin Two.
 
The Kin One sports a compact design with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. It has a 2.1" touch-screen (320 x 240 pixels), 4 GB of built-in memory, a media player powered by Zune and a five megapixel camera with LED flash. The more traditional looking Kin Two features a larger 3.2" display (480 x 320), an eight megapixel camera that boasts the ability to shoot HD videos and it has twice the amount of internal memory than the Kin One (8 GB). It also sports a slide out QWERTY keyboard.
 
These new devices are not Windows Phone Series 7 phones though. “The Kins will not run the Windows Phone 7 operating system rolled out by Microsoft in February,” reports CNN. “But they will share some features, including programs to integrate search engine Bing and music-and-video site Zune.”
 
The Kin One and Kin Two which is manufactured by Sharp will be available in the US in May and later in the year in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. Pricing details hasn’t been released yet. According to Microsoft the new ‘social phones’ were designed to publish stories via your Facebook status updates, SMS and MMS messages you send, the group photos you uploads etc.
 
“We saw an opportunity to treat your friends as contributors and editors of your storyline, and make you an editor and a contributor to your friends’ storylines,” explained Jon Friedman, creative director of Pioneer Studios (a division at Microsoft). “Only instead of being published month to month, your story is published from moment to moment.”