A year ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gave a lengthy interview to ZDNet reporter Mary-Jo Foley where he detailed its new mobile strategy following the well-documented struggles of Windows phones in the market. Back then, Nadella explained that Microsoft would refocus its phone efforts on three market segments going forward: Windows phone fans, business customers, and first-time smartphone buyers.
A few months later, we saw the early results of this strategy with a much smaller range of fifth generation Lumia devices: the high-end Lumia 950 and 950 XL, the low-end Lumia 550, and the premium-looking but low-specced Lumia 650. However, that’s not the whole story as we also knew that the Redmond giant initially had more Lumia devices in the pipeline, including a Lumia 750 and a Lumia 850. Those handsets were eventually scrapped, but we still got the chance to have a look at leaked photos of the Lumia 850 a few months ago.
Following the previous leaks, it was clear that the Lumia 850 could have been a close cousin to the Lumia 650 design-wise, with a similar metal band around its edges. However, if you always wanted to get a clearer picture of the stillborn device, Italian website Aggiornamenti Lumia shared today some new pictures of a working Lumia 850 prototype (via Neowin), and we now have a little more details about the handset’s specs:
As you can see in the above screenshots, this prototype runs an early version of Windows 10 Mobile (build 10240), as you can tell by the “Project Spartan” Live Tile and the other outdated apps. Additionally, the handsets sports a 1280×720 screen and a Snapdragon 210 processor (which you can tell by the “Chip SOC version 8909”), while other specs are still unknown.
Overall, this looks definitely like a midrange device that would probably have offered little value to the Lumia line. In the end, that’s probably why Microsoft ultimately chose to not release it. Let us know in the comments what do you think of the incomplete specs of the Lumia 850.
