Microsoft has more or less bowed out of the smartphone market. The company took a hit on its acquisition of Nokia’s smartphone business and it hasn’t released any new devices in quite some time. It’s believed that the company is trying to come up with an entirely new vision for smartphones and that’s obviously going to take time. We’ve recently been seeing photos of Lumia smartphones that were never released and now photos of the Lumia 960 flagship handset have leaked online.
If Microsoft ever released this smartphone, it would have been the successor to the Lumia 950 flagship, which was one of the best smartphones that Microsoft made back when it was still making them.
The codename for this device was reportedly Northstar and it’s said to be a successor to the Lumia 950. The technical specifications are unknown but the prototype does feature a Snapdragon 820 processor with a Quad HD display.
Even though Microsoft won’t be releasing this as a consumer device anytime soon, a report points out that this device is still being used internally at Microsoft as an engineering prototype for developing Windows 10 Mobile.
It does look like a quintessential Lumia smartphone even if it’s just a prototype. Who knows if it would have been released already had Microsoft not decided to take a break from making smartphones.