The long-rumoured Surface Phone might still be in the works. A suspicious handset got unwittingly unveiled during a recent interview of Panos Panay, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's devices.
David Pierce, the interviewer, wrote for The Wired that he saw "a prototype of a new phone" inside Microsoft's campus. The timing of the citation and the recent rumours suggest that the handset could be the Surface Phone.
In the same interview, Panay had acknowledged the existence of the Surface Mini, a 7-inch tablet that the company had planned to launch alongside the Surface Pro 3 but never did.
A report from August claimed that the Surface Phone (Mobile), codenamed Project Juggernaut Alpha, has a 5.5-inch display with QHD screen resolution. It is said to be powered by a desktop class Intel Atom x3 (SoFIA) 64-bit processor with 4GB RAM (with a variant offering 3GB of RAM).
Other features of the Surface Phone were pegged to be a 21-megapixel PureView Zeiss 6-lens rear camera, and an 8-megapixel Zeiss wide-angle shooter placed upfront. The device was also said to come with the S Pen-esque Surface Pen, with USB Type-C port. On the storage front, the Phone was noted to have 64GB and 128GB storage options with support for microSD card to extend the storage to up to 256GB.
At its event earlier this month, Microsoft launched the Lumia 950, and the Lumia 950 XL smartphones. Considering that it didn't unveil the purported Surface Phone at the event, it is likely that even if the device exists it is not ready yet and understandably, the company has no intention of launching it in the next few months.
What makes the existence of the Surface Phone plausible is the fact that Microsoft is expanding its Surface lineup. At the same event, the company announced the Surface Pro 4, which is the successor to the last year's Surface Pro 3, and the Surface Book, a Windows 10-powered laptop which also doubles as a tablet. The company has already demonstrated how its smartphones can be turned into a full-fledged computer. If the rumours are correct, the Surface Phone, interestingly with an Intel processor, hints that the company wants to move further in that direction.