It’s official, folks. Microsoft has finally confirmed that the highly anticipated Surface Phone will never become a reality, as the company now prefers focusing on entirely new form factors.
This has been revealed by Panos Panay himself, in an interview with Wired.
Long story short, Redmond will try to continue the trend that it started with the original Surface and use its resources to pioneer new product categories. Creating new, innovative form factors has now become a priority for Microsoft.
This is what he said when asked about whether this vision includes a Surface Phone:
“Well, I wouldn’t say that includes a Surface Phone. You have to think about where is that unmet need when you’re thinking about your product roadmap, when you’re thinking about your lineup. Of course we’re always inventing, of course we’re thinking about new form factors.
It doesn’t include a Surface Phone, but it includes the way to think about what it is that people want to accomplish and how they are going to accomplish it. What are those form factors?”
An answer that we already knew!
Panay explains further:
“I would say there will be new form factors, there will be new change in the market, and there will be opportunity. The way people will communicate in the future will change. The form factors will wrap around that. And so when you say the phone form factor changes, I would flip it a little bit and say that communication changes.”
The next big project on the company’s roadmap that aligns with this strategy is codenamed Andromeda, a device that is supposed to make use of a dual-screen design and supports multiple form factors.
Recent rumors indicate that Microsoft has pushed back the project from a previously speculated late 2018 release to somewhere in the fall of 2019, allegedly with the intention of improving the software that powers this machine.
As for Surface Phone, well, it’s now a dream that will never come true.
It was a good dream!
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