Microsoft is making big cuts across its organisation this week with 18,000 employees being let go and the closing of Xbox Entertainment Studios. While today"s revelation may not be directly tied to these cuts, they are slimming up the company"s upcoming profile of Lumia devices.
According to sources close to the matter, Microsoft is said to be canceling its 3D Touch phone, codenamed McLaren. The feature was born inside the heart of Microsoft"s research department but the goal of building it into a phone and shipping it later this year appears to be dead.
The canceling of this feature means that Microsoft"s flagship phone for this fall is now off the table. While we suspect that they will be able to bump the specs of another device to take the flagship position, other than increased performance, it may not have a major differentiator like 3D Touch to distinguish itself in the market. As of now, we don"t know of any flagships in the pipe for a fall release.
We should point out that 3D Touch is not dead - it is still very much alive inside of Microsoft, but only as an ongoing research project, rather than a product ready for release.
What is not known is that we had heard that Microsoft was working on at least two 3D touch devices, so are both devices dead? We do not know if this means the other device is dead too but we suspect that its future might be a bit bleak given this news.
Source: WPC