A bumper crop of new Microsoft hardware will be announced at an event in October according to a rumor coming from Chinese site WPDang. This confirms a previous rumor reported a couple of weeks ago by Neowin that said that Microsoft was going to refresh its range of hardware in time for the holiday season.
The stars of the show will undoubtedly be a Surface Pro 4 and a pair of flagship Lumia handsets. The specs of the Surface Pro 4 are still something of an unknown. It's expected to have a Skylake processor, and it would seem strange if Microsoft's first-party hardware cannot showcase new Windows 10 features such as Windows Hello biometric login. At its IDF conference in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated using voice recognition to wake a Windows PC from sleep—"Hey, Cortana, wake up!"—and similarly it would make sense for Surface Pro 4 to support this capability.
The flagship Lumia handsets have fewer surprises, with multiple leaks of their specs. The Lumia 950, codenamed Talkman, will have a 5.2-inch 1440×2560 OLED screen, six-core Qualcomm 808 processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB storage with microSD expansion, a 20MP rear and 5MP front camera, a 3000mAh removable battery, Qi wireless charging, and USB Type C. The Lumia 950 XL, codenamed Cityman, bumps the screen up to 5.7 inches, the processor to an eight-core Qualcomm 810, and the battery up to 3300mAh removable battery.
Both phones have one particular novel feature: infrared iris scanning. They'll use this for the Windows Hello login feature.
Also expected to be launched is a follow-up to the Microsoft Band, though, again, little is known about what this will entail. Microsoft kept the first Band almost completely secret during its development; Band 2 seems to be repeating that pattern.
More speculatively, there are also rumors of a new, slimmer Xbox One. This might do away with the Blu-ray drive, or possibly take advantage of a shift from using a 28nm manufacturing process to 20nm.
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