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TL;DR

• Microsoft reportedly had plans for a Surface-branded Windows Phone years before the Surface Duo, with a 2013-2014 prototype recently revealed.
• The mysterious phone featured a 720p display, physical navigation buttons, a silver Surface-like chassis, and Windows Phone 8.1.
• The Nokia acquisition may have killed the project, while Microsoft’s eventual Surface Duo took a very different dual-screen approach that came with plenty of compromises.

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Microsoft’s Surface Duo and Surface Duo 2 were ambitious first attempts from a company that had little to no experience building smartphones all by itself. The Lumia phones did carry Microsoft’s software and branding, but those phones weren’t truly built just by Microsoft — they still carried a lot of Nokia’s DNA. 2020’s Surface Duo, arguably, was Microsoft’s first smartphone designed and developed as a true first-party Surface device on its own terms. But that almost wasn’t the case, as we get to see some prototype hardware.

There could have been a Microsoft-built Surface smartphone all the way back in 2014, and it could have been unveiled alongside a Surface Pro device. The revelation comes from Windows Central, which has even shared images of what appears to be the long-forgotten Microsoft prototype.