Kin, the latest addition to their Windows Phone product portfolio, designed to capture the magazine of your life was yesterday announced in San Fransisco.

While we covered most of the facts of the Kin announcement in yesterday’s article “Kin One, Kin Two and Kin Studio – Capturing the Magazine of your Life“, I would like to focus on one of the nice features on the Kin website. You can experience the look and feel of the Kin One or Kin Two with your own Facebook data.

Connecting to your Facebook account via Facebook connect

You first need to point your preferred browser to www.kin.com and select the Kin One or the Kin Two from the navigation bar on the left. Personally I really like some of the features of the Kin Two: a larger screen, 8GB of internal storage, it shoots HD video’s in 720p and the sliding keyboard design, so I decided to choose this device.

In the screenshot above you can see the Kin Two, with below the device a few options to customize the experience. On the right you can choose the text color of the “headings”. On the left part of this toolbar you see a blue “Connect with Facebook button“, select this option.

As a result a pop-up window is shown, where you need to confirm that you want to connect with Facebook. The screenshot above shows this pop-up window, and again you need to click on the blue connect with facebook button.

The result is a login page that connects www.kin.com and your facebook account, shown in a graphical overview just above the login e-mail address and password fields. You simply fill in your credentials and hit the blue connect button.

The last and third step is to set the permissions to allow status updates to your Facebook page from www.kin.com. In the screenshot above you need to finalize via the blue button that allows status updates for www.kin.com (or leave the page).

A virtual Kin Two hands-on on www.kin.com

In the screenshot above you can see that I’m ready to enjoy the Kin Two experience on www.kin.com ! You can see most recent updates from Facebook on the Kin Lopp, while in the upper part of the screen you see my name on the left, and my profile picture on the right.

Furthermore you see the (recent) updates of Clinton, Paul, Jeff and Vincent on top of a background with pictures. In the bottom part of the screen you can see the Kin spot in the middle, on the right you see the clock while on the left there is a button with the label recent.

When I swipe with my virtual finger from left to right, you move from the Kin Loop (homescreen) to the Kin apps screen. In the screenshot above you see about 10 Kin apps: (1) messages, (2) phone, (3) e-mail, (4) browser, (5) music & more, (6) camera, (7) settings, (8) alarm clock, (9) search, and another one of which I can’t recognize the title.

Remark that the Microsoft assets Zune and Bing search are closely integrated with the Kin Phones. The Kin One and Kin Two are the first phones worldwide to ship with Zune and bring the Zune experience beyond the mediaplayer.

When you swipe from the right to the left on the Kin Loop (homescreen), you will enter the favourites screen which is shown in the screenshot above.  These are the people that you care about most, and get prioritized in the information flow on the Kin Loop.

It would be nice to see some of the underlying Kin approaches and resulting algorythms come back in the Windows Phone 7 design, for example the Kin Studio has some great features that I would love to see in the Zune software that synchronizes Windows Phone 7 devices with your Windows notebook.

Another cool feature of the virtual hands-on with the Kin Two is the ability to update my Facebook status from www.kin.com ! It is a two step process and as you can see in the screenshot above the first step is to click on your name or profile picture in the upper part of the screen.

The second step is to write down the status-update, in the example “It’s time to share!”. You can see that this messgae is shared to Facebook, since this is the social network that is checked, and simply press the update button to publish this status update to your Facebook page.

Concluding thoughts and wrap-up

While I didn’t notice this feature right away, it is a cool concept that the Kin team has taken here. It gives you a kind of virtual tour with your personal Facebook data, and provides a basic Kin user experience.

The options are not as extensive as the traditional emulators we know from Windows Mobile / Windows Phone 7, but I could really see how the Kin Loop and Kin Favourites look with my personal Facebook data.

I would like to wrap-up with a Kin Two demo for TechFlash by one of my international friends John Starkweather from the Kin team. John really provides an excellent overview of the Kin Two in all its glory !!

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS7TIGpGFaA&feature=player_embedded