Microsoft's Kin One and Kin Two phones (short for Kin-ship) will be available for pre-order on May 6th and general sale on May 13th, according to a few leaked internal photos.
The teen phones, slammed for only allowing 15 minutes of calls at a time, will have access to all the usual social notworking sites like Facebook and Twitter via a UI feature called “Kin Loop”. The entire phone is a custom job of the Windows Phone 7 “for a social networking audience,” according to Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft.
It will also have Bing built-in, but that's hardly going to topple Google's supremacy in the search market.
The Kin phones will only be available from Verizon in the US and Vodafone in Europe, but catch-up Europe will have to wait until Autumn before rich kids can make poor kids feel embarassed about their mobiles.
That is untrue. They auto refresh the social feeds in fifteen minute intervals, and the manual refresh is the unlock of the screen. Calls are as long as you like. Way to try and give bad press about a perfectly decent phone.