A hip smart phone kin for sharing

Microsoft KIN One

The Microsoft Kin is a hip new smart phone for social network users. Powered by Windows, the Kin allows you to share just about everything with everyone. Sharing is easy. At the bottom of the screen is a small green dot, called the Spot. When you find something you want to share like a web post, photo, Facebook page, video, map location or anything else you can imagine -- just drag and drop it on the Spot and send it. You can group your favorite contacts into a KIN Loop to make sharing even faster.

A really nice feature is the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard which makes it easy to respond to emails and surf the web. If the 2.6-inch touch screen display is too small, consider the KIN Two which has a much larger 3.4-inch screen. A 5.4 mega-pixel camera with anti-shake technology helps you snap really nice pictures and share them with one touch.

This is the first Windows phone to include Zune. With a Zune Pass subscription you can listen to songs on your KIN from the Zune Marketplace or load songs from your personal collection. The KIN includes a free 14-day Zune Pass trial. After the trial Zune Pass costs $14.99 per month.

These new phones are great and they can do a lot of amazing things. The problem has always been not having enough storage room on the phone and you end up having to keep swapping out memory cards. A nice feature called KIN Studio solves this problem very elegantly by backing everything up to a private, password protected website. This gives you virtually unlimited storage capacity with the added benefit of being able to share your phone's contacts with any web-connected PC.

All in all, the Microsoft KIN is a great phone that makes it easy to stay in touch anyway you want.