The pair of Microsoft handsets is being launched this time with some major differences. Originally Big Red tried to push the duo into the smartphone category which required an extra $30 per month charge for data. This time around, the Kin One and Kin Two are featurephones with e-mail and the Zune music experience. The first Kin will have a 5MP camera and 4GB of internal memory. Kin Two sports an 8MP camera, offers 8GB of online memory and captures HD video. The pair are coming down a notch and will be offered with a low end browser. Now, if you want to pay the $30 per month, you can get the goodies to make the Kin duo a smartphone once again. But if you are going to pay the same $30 for the Motorola DROID X, why would you?

Verizon plans on offering four entry-level models for the Young Adult/Teen market. The LG Octane will have a zippy browser that plays web videos and offers the Social Beat social networking service. The Pantech Crux offers many of the same features.

If you are looking for a phone for your kids that features VCAST videos, the Samsung Zeal uses its unique form factor and E-ink keyboard to make the phone a good model for entry-level users. Another model aiming at the same demographics is the LG Cosmos Touch. Offering a touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard, the handset also has access to hundreds of apps.

source: PPCGeeks

The Kin One and Kin Two are making a Q4 comeback as featurephones for Verizon

This is a lot for Verizon to release over the next few weeks and we hope there isn’t any delay. Which new phone are you most interested in?

iPhone OS (now iOS) launched on just the iPhone. Android launched on just the G1. webOS launched on just the Pre. While these operating systems all have spread onto multiple devices and show no signs of slowing down. Microsoft, on the other hand, tends to take a different and more aggressive approach to product launches. That was fully evident today with the official unveiling of Windows Phone 7 and its associated hardware. The typography-heavy operating system was present on no fewer than ten new handsets from LG, Samsung, and Dell. Oh, and HTC was there with five (5!) models on hand.

And wow, does all that look nice. We’re particularly jealous of the Dell Venue Pro. And the HTC HD7. And the HTC 7 Pro. The buzz is strong, as Windows Phone 7 is clearly a very strong entrant. Sure, it won’t have copy-paste until next year, and won’t be available in Europe until the end of October, or the USA in early November, but navigation on the demo units was smooth, hardware was solid, and a lot of the apps shown off were pretty darned impressive (especially that gaming magic).

Our pals Phil, Daniel, and George knocked today’s coverage out of New York out of the metaphorical park over at our newly relaunched sister site WPCentral. There you’ll find everything you ever wanted to know (and plenty you didn’t even know you wanted to know) about Windows Phone 7 and all of these fancy-pants handsets. Here’s hoping that after the Palm Pre 2, our friends in Sunnyvale can knock it out of the park with the next handset. Clearly, Microsoft has stepped up to the plate and brought all of their best ammunition.

Oh, and WPCentral already kicked their first post-7 podcast (though their 112th overall). As you’ve likely already surmised, it’s a doozy.

When it comes to headsets, it all comes down to audio quality and controls, and those sadly are the two areas where the LG HBS-250 bluetooth headphones fall short. While fairly beautiful in design execution, the HBS-250 headphones suffer from annoying static and frustrating controls that made it less than a joy to use. They do have at least one redeeming characteristic: the headphones are somewhat comfortable to wear.

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As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.

In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned - Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.

Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.

[via: EETimes]

Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!

Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute - that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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