Photos of an Intel-Powered Windows Phone Get Leaked

Microsoft is betting big on ARM chips, and the company still thinks they’re the future, but it turns out that the software giant at least considered an Intel-powered Windows phone at some point, according to a new leak.

Evan Blass, also known as @evleaks, has posted photos of what appears to be an Intel-powered Windows Phone, with many believing that it could be an early prototype of the Surface Phone that everyone (still) expects to launch sometime next year.

First and foremost, it’s worth mentioning that Evan says absolutely nothing about the Surface Phone, so it’s not clear if it was designed by Microsoft or not. Then, the message he posted hints that this was a project that has already been abandoned, with little chances to see it in production in the coming future.

On the other hand, he does confirm that it would have been powered by a laptop-class Intel processor, which means that instead of Windows 10 Mobile, this phone was capable of running Windows 10 and thus address all the problems of the smartphone operating system, including the lack of apps.

Intel-powered Windows phones

This isn’t the first time when an Intel-powered Windows phone makes the rounds, and there were even rumors claiming that Microsoft itself was planning such a configuration for the Surface Phone.

And while an Intel chip would obviously create a series of advantages on a Windows phone, the biggest challenge would be to offer at least decent battery life, and judging from the design we see here, such a thing was impossible. Fitting a large battery in such a thin body is super difficult and this could be one of the reasons the project was abandoned, if it ever existed in the first place.

Unfortunately, this is nothing more than just another teaser that Windows Phone could have done better if some ideas were brought to fruition, so the only thing we can do now is to hope that Microsoft is indeed working on a Surface Phone that would be truly innovative.