Windows 8 D9 demo

Make no mistake: the Kin One and Two are coming into the world as the black sheep of the phone industry, and Microsoft would have it no other way. Straddling the fence somewhere between a dedicated smartphone and high-spec featurephone, they’ve been tricky to understand since the day they were first leaked (even Microsoft seemed unsure of what the devices meant until very recently). Billed as a Gen-Y (the “upload generation”) social networking tool — and sold in advertisements as the gateway to the time of your young, freewheeling life — the Kin phones have admittedly been something of head-scratcher to those of us in the gadget world. Built atop a core similar (but not identical) to the Windows Phone 7 devices coming later this year, manufactured by Sharp, and tied into partnerships with Verizon and Vodafone, the phones dangerously preempt Microsoft’s reemergence into the smartphone market. Hell, they’re even called Windows Phones. But the One and Two aren’t like any Windows Phones you’ve ever seen. With stripped-down interfaces, deep social networking integration, and a focus on very particular type of user, Microsoft is aiming for something altogether different with Kin. So do these devices deliver on that unique, social experience that Redmond has been selling, or does this experiment fall flat? We’ve taken both handsets for a spin, and we’ve got all the answers in our full review… so read on to find out!

Kin One and Two review

read on the entire review of the two devices at engadget.com

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!

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two press shots

A big focus for Microsoft with Kin is the totally new, different, crazy UI, which is based on blocky, simple text, monochromatic elements, and zoomed-in, stylized pictures. The big two features unique to Kin are being called “Spot” and “Loop.” Loop is sort of the Kin’s home screen, aggregating social content from your friends (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) roughly based on order of priority by how you sort your contents, so you don’t have to see as many updates from people you don’t follow too closely. Spot, meanwhile, is an ever-present green dot at the bottom of the screen where you can drag content — just about any content, be it maps, images, status updates, videos — and share it with contacts. Think of it as an “Attach” button in your messaging client, but on steroids.

Both phones have full support for the Zune music and video experience (but not Zune gaming), and it looks like the Zune HD UI we’re accustomed to, just as it does on Windows Phone 7. To loop in the Mac community, Microsoft will be offering a Mac-compatible music side-loader — in other words, it won’t be a true, native Zune client and you won’t be able to use it to shop for music, but it’ll happily connect to iTunes and sync your non-DRM collection. Both phones also support over-the-air firmware updates, so there’ll be no need to tether just for that. Speaking of tethering, data tethering isn’t supported.

Verizon is getting the Kin One and Two in the US in May, while Vodafone has signed on as the European partner for a Fall launch. We’ll update you on specific pricing and availability just as soon as we have it.

Windows: Windows desktop customization tool Omnimo takes the look and feel of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 user interface and brings it to any Windows desktop in an attractive and functional form that’s fresh, useful, and full of eye candy.

(Click most of the images in this post for a closer look.)

When you’re done setting it up, the Omnimo customization will add Windows Phone 7-style widgets to your desktop that’ll give you quick access to weather, calendars, your favorite programs, your unread email, notes, system monitoring (like CPU, hard drive, and RAM use), Wi-Fi signal strength, and oh-so-much-more. Best of all, everything’s easily customizable via drag and drop once you make it through the setup, so you can make it look however you want. Here’s a quick sampling of various setups straight from the Omnimo homepage:

Note: Omnimo should work on any Windows system, XP through Windows 7.

read on the rest of the article at lifehacker.com

Don’t look surprised. With the Windows Phone 7 Series dev tools now out in the open the pent up demand for that elusive HD2 upgrade was bound to be a priority for some well-meaning developers, somewhere… namely, Russia. Now we’ve got what looks to be the first screenies of the WP7S OS running on an HD2. Better yet, htcpedia claims that almost everything is working including WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth. However, the graphics driver is still showing problems and there is noticeable device lag. Nevertheless, the team is planning a beta release soon. Imagine it, an HD2 WP7S ROM available before Microsoft and its partners can even launch an official device, with its 5 buttons or not — now that would be something. One more grab after the break, the rest at the source below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

How’s that headline treating you? Surely the same criticism leveled at the iPad holds true for this tablet concept running the Windows Phone 7 smartphone OS right? Maybe. But it’s certainly advantageous to see all those metro UI panels laid out as a single image instead of a series of vertical slices suitable to a mobile handset. And a pair of backside joysticks and double-duty touch QWERTY / viewing stand are nice features as well. Nevertheless, we already have a fictitious lover in the Courier who we’re not quite ready to betray even if the designer is named Umang Dokey, okey? Test your own nobility in the video after the break.

We’ve definitely learned a ton about Windows Phone 7 Series here at MIX, but getting the full picture on multitasking has been difficult, since the OS isn’t ready, no one has final hardware, and the emulator seems to behave differently than actual devices and Microsoft’s descriptions. So let’s set the record straight on multitasking: it’s not going to happen, at least not in the traditional way. Not only have we directly confirmed this with Microsoft executives several times, but the developer sessions here are totally clear on the matter — you don’t tell 1000+ devs that they should expect their apps to be killed whenever the user switches away from them if you don’t mean it. Now, that’s not to say that the OS can’t do multitasking: first-party apps like the Zune player and IE can run in the background, and third-party apps are actually left running in a suspended state (Microsoft calls it “dehydrated”) as long as the system doesn’t need any additional resources. If the user cycles back to an app, it’s resumed (“rehydrated”) and life continues merrily along, but if the user opens other apps and the system needs additional resources, the app is killed without any indication or remorse.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s basically a single-tasking riff on Android and Windows Mobile 6, both of which also purport to intelligently manage multiple running applications like this, and both of which usually find themselves greatly improved with manual task managers. We’ll have to see if Windows Phone 7 Series can do a better job once it ships — we have a feeling it will — and later down the line we’ll see if Microsoft decides to extend multitasking to third-party apps. But for now, just know that you’re not going to be running Pandora in the background while you do other tasks on a 7 Series device — it is a question we have specifically asked, and the answer, unfortunately, is no.

Bad news, HTC HD2 owners: Microsoft has finally come right out and confirmed our suspicions that the mighty HTC HD2 won’t be upgraded to Windows Phone 7 Series. Joe Belfiore just told us that the HD2 is “not compliant with the Windows Phone 7 Series hardware specifications,” which should end any of the lingering doubt that’s clouded this issue since MWC. That certainly puts a damper on the HD2’s upcoming launch on T-Mobile, but hey — every Microsoft employee here at MIX is carrying one, so it’s clearly the WinMo handset to get until it’s eclipsed by 7 late in the year. Pour one out for the king, friends.