GoKawiilDavid Imel / Android Authority
TL;DR Microsoft reportedly had plans for a Surface-branded Windows Phone years before the Surface Duo, with a 2013-2014 prototype recently revealed.
The mysterious phone featured a 720p display, physical navigation buttons, a silver Surface-like chassis, and Windows Phone 8.1.
The Nokia acquisition may have killed the project, while Microsoft’s eventual Surface Duo took a very different dual-screen approach that came with plenty of compromises.
Microsoft’s Surface Duo and Surface Duo 2 were ambitious first attempts from a company that had little to no experience building smartphones all by itself. The Lumia phones did carry Microsoft’s software and branding, but those phones weren’t truly built just by Microsoft — they still carried a lot of Nokia’s DNA. 2020’s Surface Duo, arguably, was Microsoft’s first smartphone designed and developed as a true first-party Surface device on its own terms. But that almost wasn’t the case, as we get to see some prototype hardware.
There could have been a Microsoft-built Surface smartphone all the way back in 2014, and it could have been unveiled alongside a Surface Pro device. The revelation comes from Windows Central, which has even shared images of what appears to be the long-forgotten Microsoft prototype.
Lo and behold, that phone screams of the Surface branding, complete with hardware keys for navigation, which were a staple of Windows phones (and phones in general) of that era.
Although not evident in the images, the unreleased device reportedly ran Windows Phone 8.1, and was powered by an unknown Qualcomm chip. Given the timeframe, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate that the device ran on one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 200, 400, 600, or 800-series chips.
The device reportedly had a 720p screen, which was also standard for the time, alongside up and down volume buttons, a camera button, and a power button. The Windows logo and the silver chassis match the 2013 Surface 2’s aesthetic.
Microsoft, for reference, announced its Nokia Devices and Services business acquisition in September of 2013, and that’s likely when the company scratched plans for the unreleased Surface Phone. Why would Microsoft continue working on its own smartphone when it had one of the biggest names in the mobile hardware business under its control? Microsoft, instead, inherited the Lumia lineup and that materialized as the Lumia 535 later in 2014.
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