Hands on: Microsoft Kin Two review

Once you're contacts are up and running, you can bust out 'The Loop', which is basically a tiled interface that shows you all the things your friends and followers are up to, with an easy way to comment, retweet and all manner of web 2.0 things from your phone.

Kin two

Another cool new addition is The Spot, which epitomises the social-media focus of the Kin Two.

You can simply hold, drag and drop practically anything onto it to share with a friend, be it a picture, contact, hyperlink (in the form of a screengrab) over MMS, Text, e-mail or through a social networking site.

It takes a while to get your head around this principle, but once you have and you start sharing a lot of info with people it suddenly seems to make a lot more sense.

Kin two

The Kin Two also offers you the chance to segregate your favourite people on the phone - these will be close friends and family and not some celebrity you follow on Twitter because you fancy them and hope they'll one day reply to your desperate attempts to contact them.

These people will also automatically be given priority when updating your feeds - meaning you'll get to see what they're saying above the babble of riveting status updates from your old school friends.

The Loop seems to work well as a method of seeing all your friends and interacting with updates and the like - but we'll need to use it for a while to see if it's really usable or turns into a large amount of noise.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.