Microsoft's Panos Panay Says Surface Phone Will Never Come To Fruition
Panay made the comments in an interview with Wired, stating, "I wouldn't say that it includes a Surface Phone. I think you have to think about where is that unmet need when you're thinking about your product road-map."
However, even though the Surface Phone is completely off the table, that doesn't mean that the Surface hardware wunderkinds aren't open to other exciting new hardware. "The way people will communicate in the future will change," Panay added.
"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."
With that in mind, we look towards Andromeda, which is a dual-screen Surface mobile device that Microsoft is reportedly working on. This is most definitely a refreshing new form-factor from Microsoft that harkens back to the Courier concept that the company cancelled a decade ago.
Do you think they got the resemblance right?
— Panos Panay (@panos_panay) June 28, 2018
Huge thanks to LG Display for the awesome caricature. #nailedit pic.twitter.com/vejlOIVuoK
Panay himself teased the device in late June, and a recent report claims that the release of Andromeda has been pushed to later in 2019. The reason for the delay is reportedly to have time to incorporate the faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 processor into the device. The SoC will provide a 30 percent performance boost over the Snapdragon 835 that would have been available had the device shipped later this year.
