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.