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Review: Kin Two

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Menus Calls / Contacts Social Networking Messaging

Besides updating status messages on the triumvirate of social networks, the Kin Two also includes a few basic messaging features. There's an email app on board with presets for Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail, AOL and Yahoo!, as well as Microsoft Exchange servers, which might be too corporate for the intended audience, but I'm not complaining. You can also enter your own settings for POP and IMAP mail accounts. Email is basic and ugly. The app can't display HTML messages, and there are very few advanced email features.

Text messaging works fine on this phone, as it should, considering SMS is probably the most popular way for the Kin Two's target crowd to communicate with each other. Messages come through in a threaded style, and they were easy to follow as a conversation. It's also very easy to send MMS messages, attaching pictures and video through the Spot or directly through the messaging app itself.

There's a sort of unified inbox on the Kin Two, and it's probably the dumbest inbox I've ever seen. While I love the unified inbox on modern BlackBerry phones, where email, text messages, instant messages and even Facebook messages all live happily together, the messaging inbox on the Kin Two displays only text messages and your calling history. Yup, every time you place a call, you get a new message in your inbox telling you that you made a call. Ditto when someone calls you. It's completely useless, it obscures new text messages and there's no way to turn it off.

There is no IM client on the Kin Two. Microsoft says that the target crowd cares more about SMS than IM, but I think it's just silly not to offer a choice.

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Sharp Kin Two

3.4" display 320 x 480 pixels
Tegra APX2600 processor
1,390 mAh battery
Hardware Text Keyboard, Headphone Jack (3.5mm)

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