Surface Phone? You Have No Idea What You’re Talking About

Surface Phone? You Have No Idea What You're Talking About
This mockup (by Jonas-Daehnert at http://www.deviantart.com/art/Microsoft-Surface-Phone-8-310437910) shouldn’t excite anyone.

The long-rumored Surface Phone has triggered a kind of irrational exuberance with Windows phone, a belief that maybe this one new device will somehow, magically, inject a little life in the dying mobile platform. Sorry, everyone. When it comes to Surface Phone, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

And that applies to everyone. Blog authors, Windows phone fans, everyone. Even the people who are working on the device (or devices) that we now think of as Surface Phone don’t really know what’s going to happen here. And I can state that with certainty because many of these same people worked on a little product called Surface mini that was actually manufactured for delivery to reviewers like me … and then canceled at the proverbial last minute. When it comes to this stuff, nothing is certain.

Nothing.

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All I know is that Microsoft has moved the formerly separate Lumia team into the Surface team, and that they are now, together, working on one or more next-generation handsets. Which may or may not ever be released. Which may or may not bear the Surface name.

That’s it. Everything else is speculation. Everything else.

The Surface Phone baloney is the perfect storm between human nature—our amazing ability to draw connections between things that are not connected (at the most extreme, these turn into what we call this “conspiracy theories”)—and fandom, where we just want to believe.

So when we see that Windows 10 Mobile is being ported to Intel x86, many naturally assume that this is “proof” that an Intel-based “Surface phone” is real. Likewise, when we see a placeholder name like “Lumia Phone X” in some Microsoft documentationsee?! see?!—those same people just need to believe that that has to refer to Surface Phone. When it fact it could refer to anything.

Look, I get it. And I’m not trying to be a wet blanket. But Windows phone fans need to grow up a lot and start being a bit more realistic.

Here’s what realistic—not negative, realistic—looks like:

Even if Surface Phone is that dream phone you pine for—a Surface-branded and styled wonder with Windows desktop app compatibility through Continuum, high-end specs and a camera that puts the over-credited Lumia 1020 to shame—it’s not going to “save” Windows phone. That ship has sailed.

Please, for your own sake. Wake up.

 

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