Microsoft 'Surface Phone' to feature Snapdragon 820 chipset?

Are we finally to see a premium enterprise smartphone from the Lumia camp?

A rumour is doing the rounds that Microsoft is working on a new range of phones to more firmly showcase desktop-like functionality.

Being dubbed "Surface Phone", and supposedly being launched towards the end of 2016, the latest rumour out of Redmond is that such a device (or devices) would sport Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 chipset.

Produced with the 14nm process, the Snapdragon 820 includes four Kyro cores as well as Adreno 530 GPU. This makes it 40 per cent faster at processing graphics than the Snapdragon 810. The Snapdragon 820 is such a top-end choice for the next wave of smartphones, it's being linked with the likes of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7, and is a far cry from the "budget" place in the market Microsoft's Lumia range has previously inhabited. With liquid cooling already introduced in the similarly "desktop-like" Lumias 950 and 950 XL (not to mention Surface before it), which were unveiled a few weeks back, Microsoft seems more than able to cool down such a potentially high-end piece of technology.

The rumours persist that a "Surface Phone" would be given flagship status in Microsoft's phone range - just like the Surface before it. There is also one phrase being directly quoted in the rumour mill - "enhanced continuum".

This is a potentially exciting concept, as the "desktop-like" functionality of the new Lumias still needs to be fully proven, but is not thought to offer full Win 32 features when plugged into a desktop monitor.

While a fast Snapdragon - being ARM-based - is still not going to embrace the Win 32/64 potential of a full-fat Windows 10 environment, a speedy, app-based performance could still be a good consolation prize, and could even begin to pave the way for more enterprise-focused versions of a powerful Windows 10 Phone for the future.

It feels time for Microsoft to begin properly putting its money where its mouth is in terms of continuum - while cloud saving for Office documents and cross-device OneDrive synching is useful, it's hardly much beyond offerings by many other vendors, whether they be first-party services like iCloud or third party, such as Box.

With many CIOs still extremely keen to buy into an all-Windows environment, it's critical that Microsoft starts to turn the phone piece of its devices story into a real player in the market. As it stands, a two to three per cent share of the market isn't enough to turn heads, and it's Computing's belief that a focus on a cross-device Windows environment look and feel could be much more important than an attempt to focus on an app store which, despite the company's best efforts, is still failing to get off the ground.