The NuAns Neo was an ambitious phone with desktop capabilities and an easy to personalize design, but it had the insides of a $100 phone.
While Windows is best known as a desktop operating system, Microsoft’s big push with Windows 8 was to make both the internals and the user interface capable of running on a touch-based, ARM-powered device. This caused a massive rewrite of Windows Phone as it went from version 7 to version 8 and breaking app compatibility. The desktop and mobile OSes continued to move closer together and Windows 10 Mobile’s Continuum feature blurred the lines between desktop and mobile.
The hero of today’s story – well, the tragic hero, but let’s not spoil the story – is called the NuAns Neo. Continuum plays a big part in its story as it was one of the highlights in the Kickstarter campaign.
For those unfamiliar, Continuum was a desktop mode for Windows 10 Mobile. It could pipe video out through a USB-C port and could run mobile apps in windowed mode. Better yet, it could run Win32 apps, i.e. Windows applications written for 32-bit x86 processors (which was the majority of apps at the time).
We immediately encounter the problem with this plan. The Neo was powered by a Snapdragon 617, a 28nm chipset from late 2015 that featured an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU (4+4, 1.5GHz + 1.2GHz configuration) and had an Adreno 405 GPU, plus a Cat. 7 LTE modem (300Mbps down/100Mbps up).
To say that is under-powered would be an understatement – NuAns wanted to launch the Neo in mid-2016, around the same time that ZTE unveiled the Zmax Pro, a $99 phone with the SD 617, 2GB of RAM and 32GB storage. For comparison, the Neo also had 2GB of RAM and just 16GB of internal storage (expandable with UHS-I microSD cards up to 128GB).
That’s very little computing power for a desktop replacement. For further context of the tech scene in 2016, you could pick up a Lumia 950 for just £250 and Microsoft would have thrown in a free Display Dock for use with the Continuum feature. A Lumia 950 XL was £340. Microsoft was handing out free Docks in the US and Canada too.
Admittedly, the Snapdragon 808 and 810 chipsets inside those phones were deeply flawed, but they were still miles better than the 617. And you got 3GB of RAM plus 32GB storage (expandable).
Okay, to be fair, at that time Microsoft was holding a fire sale of its Lumia inventory as it had lost confidence in its smartphone business. And the NuAns Neo wasn’t an expensive phone – its market value was listed as $400, but early bird backers could get it for $270.
Let’s look at the hardware – we’ll have more to say about the design later as that is by far the best feature on the phone.
