Microsoft Flagship Phone That Never Got To See The Light Of Day

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Mclaren; the word most of us would associate with cars. Surprisingly, it was also the codename for the Microsoft flagship phone that was never released. While there has not been any talk about the unreleased phone for quite some time now, Laura Butler, a distinguished engineer and Vice President at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), has decided to divulge more information about the flagship phone from Microsoft which was quite promising and capable to turning heads, but never released.

Let us first revise the information already available regarding the phone.

Microsoft Flagship Phone: Falling Prey to Regime Change

Up until July of 2014, news had been circulating around the world that Microsoft was about to release a new flagship smartphone by the fall of that year which was code-named Mclaren.

The distinguishing feature?

The smartphone was about to introduce to the world a new gesture technology called 3D touch. One of the other exciting technologies that were scheduled to be released with the device called Mixview. Mixview is a User Interface feature which allowed the tiles in Windows phone to explode into smaller tiles. Microsoft even attempted to patent the UI feature in 2016, possibly to use in future versions of Windows. Different aspects of the device were supposedly derived from Microsoft’s Kinect.

But apparently, the biggest loss of them all was the camera that was supposed to come with the device. The Mclaren phone had a 20-megapixel camera lined up to be released.

Laura Butler’s Revelations

Not only was Laura Butler, one of the earliest employees at Microsoft, but also she was the driving force behind the features of the Windows Phone 7 Metro interface, live tiles, home screen and touch. In a video released by Microsoft, she had this to say:-

“You’ve all heard about the McLaren phone and it was real. It had hover touch and we never explained in the press why this was actually so helpful. So it wasn’t hover touch, it was 3D touch.”

Among other things, she mentioned the functionality of the 3D touch feature and indicated towards its helpfulness towards not only an effective workflow, but also about the enhanced speed of Keyboard and Typing that the device would allow.

One other interesting thing mentioned by her was regarding the camera of the unreleased device. Despite having only 20-megapixels, that camera was apparently ‘even better than the Nokia 1020’.

Nokia 1020 was succeeded by Nokia 1520, which was apparently the best Windows Phone in the first quarter of 2014. It was loaded with features like a quad-core 2.2 GHz processor and a 20-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. Butler mentioned a few details about the successor of the Nokia 1520, saying that it would come with features like a Bluetooth keyboard and Landscape modes.

After making many failed attempts, including the acquisition of Nokia, Microsoft exited the smartphone device business in 2016, soon after Satya Nadella took the charge over as CEO.

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