With the growing popularity of both Apple’s and Google’s smartphones, Microsoft have decided to compete in this market with their new Microsoft Kin smartphones – With a main focus on social features. The Kin phones have 3 different social features aspects to them. The first one is called “Kin Loop”, which aggregates different social networking feeds such as from Twitter, Facebook and Myspace and puts them into a single portal. The second one is called “Kin Spot”, which allows users to easily and quickly share images, videos, status updates and location information by simply dragging that information to an area of the phone named “The Spot”. Finally, the third aspect is called “Kin Studio”, which ensures that everything created on the phone, such as photos and videos, are stored in the cloud, making them accessible to anything with an internet browser.

The new Kin smartphones have a slide-out qwerty keyboard with a touchscreen too, which is to be expected in this market due to the high demand for touchscreens smartphones.

What is interesting is that these Microsoft Kin phones will not be running on Microsoft’s Windows 7 Series software for phones, which is rather strange – Why wouldn’t Microsoft use their own operating system on their own phone?

Currently, there are two devices in development, named the Kin One and the Kin Two (Very creative names). Although there hasn’t been many specific information released by Microsoft, it is known that the smaller device, the Kin One, does have an impressive 5 megapixel camera whilst the larger device, the Kin Two, has an 8 megapixel – Which can take HD video. The Kin Two also has a larger screen, larger keyboard and more storage capacity.

It seems Microsoft were attempting to target the younger generation with their Kin smartphones as not only is social features the main focus of the phone, but the cameras are also developed to take good quality photos in low lighting conditions which many phones these days fail with.

Pricing information will be announced closer to the release date, Microsoft say. The release date is actually very close, with Microsoft saying that it will be available in the US market in just several weeks on the Verizon network. However, users in other countries will have to wait much longer as the Kin One and Kin Two is to be released on the Vodafone network in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom sometime in Autumn of this year.

The big question surrounding this is whether or not the Kin smartphones will actually be able to compete against large companies such as Apple and Google. Microsoft have been in the mobile phone industry for nearly a decade but it has always failed to get a significant market share, so will they be able to manage it now? We’ll have to see. They may struggle to compete with Apple’s iPhone due to the lack of ability to download applications and games, which is a very big let-down.

Yesterday, Apple released information about iPhone OS 4.0 – Which promises to add nearly 100 new features to the already-popular iPhone and iPod touch.

This new OS software release also prepares us for the new iPhone to be released, which speculators state should be announced by the end of June 2010. Unfortunately, we iPhone and iPod Touch users have to wait until the summer to get our hands on iPhone OS 4.0.

The biggest feature announcement that was made in the conference yesterday was the ability to multi-task. This is something that many users have been waiting for for a long time and should have been implemented from the start. It’s great that we finally get to use this – Well, some people do. Only iPhone 3GS and the latest iPod Touch users can handle multi-tasking, which means users like me with the iPhone 3G cannot use this great new feature. Very disappointing.

There are two other surprising announcements from Apple – First of all, they announced the iAd advertising platform. Apple are now trying to become a massive mobile advertising player with this network, whether it will succeed or not is another matter. The next surprise addition is the Apple Game Centre, which some people are comparing to the likes of Sony’s Playstation Network. However, can Apple really make an effective gaming network on devices such as an iPhone or iPod Touch?

Another nifty feature is the ability to group applications into folders. For example, if you want to categorise applications together – Maybe in groups such as games, social networking, tools etc… then you can now create folders for these to make it much easier to find the applications that you wish to use, saving you from having to scroll across the many pages of applications on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

The features mentioned are just a small fraction on what is to be changed in the iPhone OS 4.0. There was quite a lot of decent updates in this release and that’s what I like to here, but still, it is disappointing that Apple are trying to “leave it’s older models behind” by removing some functionality in this release. I of course will be updating, though.