Read more MML’s Kin coverage – What is it? – My View

The Kin devices have taken the same approach as the Windows Phone 7 team in that they are making sure as many other Microsoft services are integrated into the device as possible such as the obvious ones Windows Live, Zune and Bing search. This is great to see and I only wish this had been done by more teams at Microsoft before 2010.

Windows Live

However I believe that with Windows Live there is more going on than meets the eye, its clear to see that its possible update one’s status or share a photo using Windows Live but its also possible to share videos on the service. Currently its not possible to watch videos online through Windows Live however it is expected that the Photos service will be expanded to allow the playback of videos stored online. There have been pictures of videos accessible through a new version of Windows Live Messenger and online. Windows Live ID is also the signin system used to collate a user’s social networks into a unified list through partnerships Microsoft has with social networks.

The Kin Studio service that backs up all the content from the Kin devices has been described as unlimited storage for the devices which sounds excellent and currently there is no service from Microsoft that offers that kind of storage solution. Live Mesh offers 5GBs and SkyDrive offers 25GBs, these services are not expected to merge when the Wave 4 update is released. However when I watched the Channel 9 video with a hands on of the Kin devices and Kin Studio it was said that “Windows Live storage” provides all the cloud storage for the service. To me this can only be SkyDrive, in which case Windows Live SkyDrive may not have a limit on storage come the Wave 4 update and possible feature some of the synching technology of Live Mesh, which will be great.

Lets not get our hopes up though, if SkyDrive does indeed get unlimited storage it might only be available to the Kin devices to store data in the cloud with no front end for consumers.

One final thing though is that Kin will be launching in the US in May, as I said currently video playback isn’t supported in Windows Live services so I guess there must be an update coming within the next month or so. One date that springs to mind is May 18th when it is thought Microsoft will release a beta version of the Essentials suite of Windows Live applications. this then could also be the release date of the Kin devices.

Zune

We have known that Zune will be coming to Windows Phone 7 but Kin will actually be the first “Zune Phone” with the ability for the Zune software to stream music using the phone’s network. I believe that if users want to watch videos from the Zune Marketplace then they need to sync them onto the device before hand rather than stream them.

Unlike Windows Phone 7 though the Kin devices wont require the Zune PC software to sync music and video to the device, because the data is synced to the cloud rather than a computer, instead using the Kin Studio to keep content up to date in the cloud and on the device.

Bing

Bing also makes an appearance on the devices as the only search provider in the dedicated search application on the device and the ability to use the full power of Bing to find things locally.

I find it interesting that search on the Kin devices has three separate screens to swipe through to chose which kind of search the user wants to do, whether it be on the device, on the net or locally. This is not as elegant as it could be, surely it would be better to have a single search screen and then swipe through the results, more the pivot UI seen on the Windows Phone 7 search.

As ever its great to see integration of Microsoft services in new products and I hope that update to the Windows Live service will be coming soon.