Microsoft has announced plans to launch new Windows 10 hardware at an October 6th event in New York City. While the company isn’t saying what hardware we should expect, word on the street is that Microsoft will use the event to launch the long-rumored Surface Pro 4 tablet and Lumia 950 and Lumix 950 XL smartphones.

lumia 950 xl
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL

There’s not much we know about the next-gen Surface tablet, but it seems likely that it’ll be powered by an Intel 6th-gen Core “Skylake” processor. Last year’s model has a 4th-gen “Haswell” chip, which was the latest generation Intel offered at the time the Surface Pro 3 launched.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 will have plenty of competition: Apple recently unveiled its iPad Pro tablet, Dell’s expected to launch a 12 inch Windows tablet with a 4K display soon, and Toshiba may have a 12 inch tablet in the works as well.

The new Lumia 950 and 950 XL smartphones, code-named Talkman and Cityman, are expected to be some of the first devices to support Continuum for Phone, allowing you to connect the phones to desktop docking stations in order to run apps in desktop mode.

Hold the Windows 10 phones in your hands, and you’ll have a touch-friendly user interface. Connect to an external monitor and the Start Screen acts as a Start Menu, a taskbar appears, and you get multi-column views for apps, along with keyboard and mouse support.

The Lumia 950 is expected to feature a 5.2 inch display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor, and a 3,000 mAh battery, while the Lumia 950 XL should have a 5.7 inch screen, a Snapdragon 810 processor, and a 3,300 mAh battery.

Both are expected to have 2560 x 1440 pixel displays, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 20MP rear cameras, 5MP front cameras, microSD card slots, USB Type-C connectors, and support for Qi wireless charging.

 

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17 replies on “Microsoft could launch Surface Pro 4, Lumia 950 and 950 XL phones at Oct 6th event”

  1. Hi,

    This stylish models, but why black and white. While there are leaking colors.

  2. I’ve been waiting for the Surface 3 with unlocked LTE. Hopefully, it works on Verizon’s LTE. It supposedly supports at least one of Verizon’s frequencies but we’ll see.

    It’d be nice if MS comes out with an even smaller x86 Surface with a keyboard and built-in trackpad/trackstick attachment (I don’t have much use for an active pen) and/or a 10″ Surface with a Core M in the next year or 2.

    If Continuum and universal apps turn out as awesome as they’re marketing it, then I’d finally jump on the phablet craze with a largish x86 Windows phone.

    1. Continuum definitely has a lot of potential but I’ll give it a year… Developers need to get behind it before that potential can be realized and it’ll be awhile before there’s a good number of apps to choose from… Right now it looks like at launch we won’t have much more than the MS Mobile Office apps and the Edge browser to use in Continuum…

      While we’ll also have to see how many take advantage of the option to port their Android and iOS apps to the new platform as well and whether those apps can be used in Continuum remains to be seen…

      Besides, the features are mainly for the flagship phones right now and it’ll take awhile before they trickle down to the more affordable phones…

        1. Maybe next year when Broxton comes out… It’ll be the first fully scale-able architecture from Intel that will allow it to range from the phones to the tablet full PC SoCs…

          In the meantime Intel needs better yields on their 14nm and may need to work on a overheating issue with the latest ATOMs, at least the Cherry Trail’s as indicated by some throttling issues on some Chinese tablets and at least one GPU benchmark the Surface 3 was put through that caused it to auto shut down…

          And those are in much larger tablets, so that pretty much rules out using them on smaller devices like phones for now…

          While the existing Intel Phone SoCs are lower clocked, allowing them to mainly compete in the mid-range, and use mobile GPU’s from Imagination and Mali, which of course don’t have driver support for desktop Windows, etc. So limited to just running Android and WP8.1/W10 Mobile…

          1. That’s what I’m hoping. Broxton FTW…?

            I would be interested to see what benchmark caused the Surface 3 to shutdown? I actually own one, and with gaming it does tend to throttle some, but I believe it’s a mixture of TDP and temp throttling. I’m sure Furmark + Prime95 would cause it to shutdown?

            No doubt Cherry Trail runs hotter than Bay Trail. It could be yields, and it could be that heat transfer is tougher when the CPU cores were shrunk 64% compared to Bay Trail. I’ve noticed that my low end(Z3735F/D) Bay Trail devices don’t even come close to temp throttling.

            The Z3850 (Moorefield) in the Asus Zenfone 2 is actually clocked @ 2.3GHz, and in some cases it’s faster on the CPU side vs.The X7-Z8700 in the S3. The PowerVR GPU could be the key to better efficiency? Would be kind of cool if they created some drivers for windows.

          2. Actually, the 2.3GHz is just the burst mode… It’s similar to the Intel Core’s Turbo Clocks… Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t report the actual base clock for their phone SoCs but it can be as low as 1.6GHz or even lower as phone SoCs need to power sip more than the tablet SoCs as well…

            While it’s a combination of Silvermont Cores (same as Bay Trail, you’re right that it’s a factor) and the Imagination PowerVR that gives it a much more reasonable thermal threshold limit, yields on the 22nm FAB are very good… but again, this only rates it as a mid-range offering as far as present mobile SoC performance goes for phones… So Intel really needs the update next year to catch up with the top phone SoCs… but that’s one of the reasons why you’re more likely to see 4GB of RAM pushed for the Intel phones to help them stand out for now…

            Mind, top end ARM SoCs are moving to six core or Big/Little Octo cores… while improvements in multi-threading means the more cores are benefiting overall performance… and the latest SoCs have seemed to fix previous thermal throttling issues and thus are better maximizing performance with even more powerful GPU’s than Intel is using presently…

            While only the Intel x3 (SoFIA) SoC provides a fully integrated SoC, won’t go onto the 14nm FAB until next year, and is really only trying to compete on the low end with ARM’s A7 SoCs but is the first step to phasing out the subsidies Intel is presently using to stay price competitive with the ARM SoCs, which Broxton should also help address… So, yeah, Broxton FTW… hopefully…

            For the Surface 3… Check out the notebookcheck review…

            https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-3-Tablet-Convertible-Review.141116.0.html

            Stress Test

            The CPU will start with its maximum clock of 2.4 GHz when we stress it with
            Prime95, but the clock slowly drops after a few minutes when the temperature reaches around 84 °C and then levels off between 1.4 and 2.0GHz, while the core temperature of the CPU is between 70-80 °C. If we also start FurMark and stress the integrated HD Graphics (Cherry Trail), the CPU clock will immediately drop to 540 MHz and the system shuts down a couple of seconds later. This is probably a safety mechanism to protect the system against damages caused by high temperatures. Our stress test measurements therefore only represent the test with Prime95.

            Btw, the last time Intel used Imagination PowerVR GPU for a Windows desktop OS system was with the GMA500/600, which was notorious for the terrible driver support… So, I doubt anyone wants to go back to that again… especially, non-Windows users as Imagination doesn’t support GNU/Linux distros either…

          3. Excellent post. I had no idea Moorefield had a base clock, as no review site seems to disclose that information, at least that I’ve seen.

            I’ve seen SoFIA in a few low end Chinese tablets, but they seem to be relatively weak on the performance side. I was gonna pick up one since they are so cheap, but I figured it may struggle giving my 2012 Nexus 7 a run for it’s money after looking at the benches.

            I figured the stress tests had to be a combination of those two. While unrealistic load wise, it’s at least interesting to see what happens when the going gets tough.

            🙂 I almost forgot about the good ole GMA integrated graphics. Yes, the drivers were terrible and the performance was probably worse :0

          4. I had no idea Moorefield had a base clock, as no review site seems to disclose that information, at least that I’ve seen.

            It doesn’t help that Intel doesn’t report the base clocks but right on the Intel ARK product page it states the clock they do list as the “Burst Frequency”, which as I stated before is the ATOM version of the Turbo Clocks… but sites like Anandtech do mention it in passing as one of the details they couldn’t find out, without doing an in depth analysis of their own, because Intel doesn’t report it…

            I’ve seen SoFIA in a few low end Chinese tablets, but they seem to be relatively weak on the performance side

            Like I stated, it’s only intended to compete on the low end… The first model out was just a dual core limited to 1GHz and no Burst mode… by next year we’ll see quad core version with limited Burst Mode and a slightly faster base clock but still intended for low end, which is why they’re still continuing with the Moorefield and Merrifield SoCs, basically skipping over the Airmont architecture update, and waiting for Broxton with the Goldmont architecture update before the next major phone SoC update…

            Though, we may see some x5/x7 Cherry Trail SoCs in some phones later in a similar setup as the present Moorefield and Merrifield SoCs, using a separate Intel Modem chip to provide the phone functionality… but right now that’s just rumor but would hold the market over until the next Gen SoCs can be mass produced late next year…

            Btw, Goldmont architecture will update the Intel ATOM HD GMA to Gen 9 (Skylake) and we’ll also see a partial update next year for Intel’s Core series that should further improve Intel’s GPU performance and that should make it to the next ATOM update around 2017, just in time for Intel’s planned 10nm FAB advance… So Intel seems determined to provide their GMA’s for all their mobile SoCs, eventually, and while they may not be able to catch up to the other mobile GPU’s performance in just two years but they should be able to be competitive enough by then…

  3. October 6? I thought the big event was held on October 10? The event is just a paper launch anyhow we won’t get anything till a month later! Med November or so….I to looking at the 12″ Surface Pro 4, Lumia 950 XL and maybe Band 2.0

    17 hours of battery battery life the 12″ Surface Pro 4 get’s!

    The 14″ Surface Pro 4 won’t get near 17 hours thought?

    1. It has been clarified that they’ll be live streaming the event on October 6… URL yet to be released…

      For the Surface Pro 4 getting 17 hours… Unlikely, but it’s likely to be getting a Skylake Core M option and that should give a much better run time as long as they don’t shrink the battery from the previous model for at least over 10 hours…

      Though, if they update the power cover for it then that’ll mean a secondary battery that could give that kind of total battery life for all day usage…

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