Microsoft launched two mobile phones this week that are based on a new flavor of Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system, Windows® Phone 7.

The mobile phones, named KIN One and KIN Two, come with an entirely new interface that puts social services such as Facebook, Twitter and newsfeeds at its core.

“If you are focused on social connection, self expression and a digital life, how do you bring that to a phone?” says Robbie Bach, president for entertainment and devices division at Microsoft. “As we were working on Windows Phone 7, we decided we had an opportunity to go after this social group of people?”

KIN One is a petite, rounded device with a 2.1-inch screen. KIN Two is a larger, palm-sized device with a 3.5-inch display.

KIN One has a 5-megapixel camera, while KIN Two sports an 8-megapixel camera. Both phones have multitouch displays, an accelerometer and video-recording capability, as well as hardware keyboards that slide out from underneath the screen.

Mobile phones that integrate closely with social networking sites have been a huge trend with handset makers in the last two years. Almost every major phone maker, including Motorola and HTC, has phones that integrate Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and newsfeeds into a single stream on the phone’s display.

Microsoft’s latest mobile phones are based on the concept of sharing, and try to bring the PC and the phone closer, say company reps.

The mobile phones use some components from the company’s latest operating system, Windows Phone 7. But it isn’t exactly the same OS that powers this device, says Bach.

Think of it as a fork in the road for Windows Mobile 7, where Microsoft has taken some components from the OS and added a new interface layer to create the KIN phone, says Microsoft.

KIN phones will have three home screens. The first includes access to e-mail, phone, newsfeeds, photos and browser. Swipe to the left and the next screen throws up a stream of status messages updated from contacts and newsfeeds. Swipe to the left once more and the third screen is a list of favorites marked by the phone users and what their social status says right then.

What makes the KIN different, says Microsoft, is that it automatically backs up all its contents on a password-protected website. This idea of storing information in the cloud means users can access their photos, videos, messages and even call history from a browser anywhere and don’t have to just depend on their mobile phone.

The service offers unlimited storage, says Microsoft and it will be free.

KIN also integrates Microsoft’s Zune digital music service. The phone’s music player has the same interface as the Zune HD. It also includes access only to Bing search.

The mobile phones have been manufactured by Sharp and will be available on Verizon’s Wireless network in May 2010 and on Vodafone in the UK and Europe in autumn 2010.

To read more about the new Microsoft Windows KIN Social Networking Phones, including specifications and features, visit the KIN Cell Phones website here

article courtesy of www.KinCellPhones.com visit them to learn much more

Together, they viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages and spent more than 4.8 billion minutes (60 million hours) online during the month.

The figures go to support our earlier feature that business in the UK cannot afford to ignore the mobile device user if they want their website to be successful.

So which websites were the most popular?

Facebook dominated the statistics, racking up the most unique visitors (5 million), the most number of pages viewed (2.6 million) and the most time spent on the site.

Google sites were second in the list with around with 4.57 million unique users.

Others sites that appeared in the top ten – which accounted for 70% of usage – included Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft.

The December 2009 top ten:

As mobile phone technology advances at a dynamic pace, we just cannot afford to ignore the fact that people are now using their mobile phones as a device to surf the Internet, and they could be your next customers.
When MyWebsiteSpace design a website, we consider the internet browser compatabilty issues that mobile phone devices raise. For example; the Apple iPhone and iTouch mobile devices are not capable of displaying Adobe Flash animations, and there are no plans by Apple to change this. (January 2010)

As a professional business to business website company, we now advise all of our clients to consider the implications that every day, more and more people are using their mobile device to visit websites.

To MyWebsiteSpace it is not a problem, we build a mobile phone browsing solution into over 75% (and rising) of all our new business websites as standard. That’s right standard, no extra charge!

With a single click, our mobile web interface transforms your website into an iPhone application style theme, complete with the simple loading of articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

We are able to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your website to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors.

Your visitors will appreciate the ability to easily switch between the Mobile Device view and your websites regular look if they prefer.

So before you choose your website designer, take a look at their website using your mobile phone device. If they cannot design a website that has mobile device compatability, your website will be going out of date at the same rate as it is being built!

Contact us to discuss how we can help you keep your website up with the views of your mobile customers.