According to the China Times, sources from the supply chain reconfirmed that Microsoft has been quietly working on the rumored homebrew Surface Phone handset for the last four months, and is expected to finish and launch it some time in the first half of next year.
The
alliance with Nokia as a manufacturing arm didn't pan out as Microsoft
intended, as the first Lumia phones couldn't quite gain traction against
the dual-core, high-res offerings of Android and iOS. Microsoft has
certainly itself to blame since it took it quite a long time to
introduce support for modern hardware in its mobile OS, and Nokia showed
it can deliver innovative handsets when the platform allows it, with
the Lumia 920.
Still, Microsoft is apparently hedging its bets, letting Samsung's ATIV S be the first WP8 device announced, not a Nokia phone, and working with HTC's designers for a year over the look and feel of the 8X and 8S phones. Now it might turn out that Redmond is developing its own hardware to achieve full vertical integration, just like Apple does, further down the road, when it gains enough manufacturing experience.
While
we doubt that it will beat Nokia's WP8 devices, a Surface phone might
become what the Nexus line has turn into for Google - a playground which
gets all the newest updates first, and has some special aura for fans
of the mobile OS, not to mention it could fill Microsoft's own vision
about how its handset should look and behave - a vision not necessarily
shared by any of the big WP8 manufacturers, but unique Microsoft. Well,
the more, the merrier, we'd say, and leave it at that until more
substantiated rumors appear.
