Microsoft unveils Tegra-powered Kin smartphones

Microsoft has launched the Kin One and Kin Two, the first smartphones to use Nvidia's Tegra chipset.

The handsets the results of Microsoft's much-rumoured "Project Pink" venture are aimed at a youthful market, using a customised Windows Phone 7 Series interface that prioritises social networking and ease of interaction.

Both the new models come with a touch screen and full slide-out keyboard, but in different form factors.

The Kin One is roughly square, with the QWERTY keyboard sliding downwards from underneath to give it a squat candybar shape when open. The Kin Two has a more conventional slider design, with the keyboard sliding down with the phone in landscape orientation.

While the Tegra APX 2600 chip is nearly two years old now and has found its way into several portable media players including Microsoft's own Zune this is its first appearance on a smartphone.

The next-gen Tegra 2 platform is expected to start appearing in smartphones by the end of the year.

In terms of features, the Kin One is the more entry-level of the two handsets. It features a five megapixel camera with LED flash, built-in GPS, a 2.6in QVGA display and 4GB of internal flash memory. Microsoft's Zune music player is on board too, though the Kin One only has a mono speaker of its own.

The more advanced Kin Two boosts the camera to an eight megapixel affair and throws in 720p video recording too. The screen is a 3.4in QVGA touch screen, while you also get stereo speakers, 8GB of internal memory and the same Zune Player.

Neither handset supports memory cards, with Microsoft instead offering a cloud-based solution that lets you sync your handsets with Kin Studio a back-up service that wraps up all your text messages, call history, photos, videos and contacts in a single personal time line.

A similar approach is taken to social networking. Instead of each service being accessed through a separate app, the Kin Loop feature integrates all status updates from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Windows Live into a single interface in real time.

Microsoft says its first venture into mobile hardware - though the Kin handsets are actually manufactured by Sharp - is all about providing a consistent, high-quality user experience.

"In the past, we saw ourselves as providing operating systems for people," said Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of entertainment and devices, at the launch event yesterday in San Francisco.

"Today we think of ourselves as providing great mobile experience for people."

Both Kin smartphones will go on sale in the US next month, but here in the UK we'll have to wait until autumn to get our hands on one courtesy of Vodafone.