Are we about to see the Surface Phone appear at last?

Rumours of a Surface Phone have been swirling for many months now, and despite the slow demise of Windows on mobile, Microsoft continues to push plenty of other Surface-branded bits of kit. Now it looks like a phone could finally be on the cards.

Leaked images from well-known tipster Evan Blass (@evleaks) show a large handset running what looks like Windows 10 Mobile. According to Blass, the phone is going to come rocking a "laptop-class Intel processor", so there should be plenty of internal power to go around.

Blass is famous for the accuracy of his information and has previewed countless phones in advance in the past, so it's likely that this really is something Microsoft's working on. Follow-up tweets by Blass have confirmed that this isn't just a concept, but an actual device heading our way.

Under the surface

Could this be the premium "prosumer/enthusiast" edition of the Surface Phone there have been rumours about before? Last we heard Microsoft was working on three editions of the Surface Phone to satisfy casual, business and power users.

There are still plenty of questions though, such as how exactly these rendered images might fit with the actual phone, and the software it's going to run - some analysts were expecting the Surface Phone to run real Windows 10 rather than the cut-down Mobile version shown in these images, and the talk of a desktop CPU would seem to back that up.

Hopefully we'll get all the answers early in 2017 - it's possible that Microsoft is holding off until the next major Windows update in the spring, at which point Intel's next-generation Kaby Lake processors should be well established too.

• Microsoft's Surface Phone could have a new kind of fingerprint scanner

Source: TechRadar posted by Campus94