Review: Kin Two
Camera
The eight megapixel camera on the Kin Two puts it at the top of its class for cameraphone sensors, so it was especially disappointing that the camera interface and features seem to have been an afterthought on this phone. That is to say, there are no real camera features. There's no touch focus, no smile detection, no panorama mode. These are features you'll find on many other high end feature phones, but the closest the Kin Two comes is a fairly useless burst mode that would only take a couple consecutive pictures for me before it quit trying. There is a rudimentary white balance to account for cloudy days or indoor, office lighting. You can choose faster, cell tower based geotagging or real GPS geotags. Even for resolution controls, the Kin Two lacks details, offering only small, medium and large, with no idea of how many pixels you'll shed as you step down.
The camera opened after a few seconds of waiting. It took about four or five seconds between pictures to get ready for the next shot. That's fairly slow, but no real surprise here. The LED flash was nice and bright, and I took some sample shots in a completely dark room, where the Kin Two was able to light me up for a self portrait.
The camcorder gets even fewer options. You can switch from high-definition, 720p video to a smaller VGA format. The Kin Two will not email or upload 720p videos to the Kin Studio, but VGA clips will upload automatically and can be sent wherever you like. Otherwise, the camcorder has a night mode, and you can also set geotagging options for videos, just like with still photos.
Gallery
The Kin Two has an innovative concept for handling the photo gallery, and I wish it lived up to its potential. As you take pictures and lower resolution videos, the Kin Two automatically uploads them to the Kin Studio, a Web site that is part of kin.com. As you snap pics, make phone calls and receive messages, the Kin Two tracks all of these on the Kin Studio, and you end up with a very cool timeline of your life and experiences with the Kin Two. The Web site looks great. Ironically, it was almost as sluggish as the phone itself (perhaps Silverlight is the culprit all around?), especially when it came to downloading pictures and videos.
The Kin Two gallery gives you plenty of options for uploading and sharing pics, but not for editing. You can email pics, send images as an MMS message or upload pics to Facebook, MySpace or a Windows Live account. To get up close with your pictures, you can pinch and zoom to reveal fine details, but the pinch gesture did not work well in the gallery app, and the image would sometimes jump all over the screen as I tried to zoom in.
Scroll left to right and you'll find saved images, if you've uploaded your own pics to the Kin Two through the Kin Studio site. You'll also find a few of the most recent albums uploaded by your contacts to Facebook or MySpace. From all of my hundreds of contacts, I was only offered three galleries to choose from, with no option to browse for more, or pick out the albums from a specific user. This made the online gallery feature nearly worthless.
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