Brand Lumia | First released Never released | |
Codename McLaren (formerly Goldfinger) Manufacturer Microsoft Mobile (formerly Nokia) Predecessor Nokia Lumia 930
Nokia Lumia 1020 Successor Microsoft Lumia 950
Microsoft Lumia 950 XL | ||
The Nokia Lumia McLaren is an unreleased smartphone developed by Nokia and Microsoft Mobile that utilised a new technology dubbed "3D Touch" (a feature that is unrelated and not the same as the 3D Touch feature that was introduced on the iPhone 6s in late-2015).
Contents
Rumors of the McLaren dated back to November 2013. At this point, the phone was actually originally codenamed "Goldfinger", but the name was changed to McLaren later during development. McLaren was eventually cancelled in July 2014, merely four months before its supposed launch in the November of that year.
Hardware
The final prototypes of the McLaren featured a grey metal body with a polycarbonate strip along the bottom, likely for radio transparency for the antennas. Daniel Rubino of Windows Central described the device as a "cross between the Lumia 1020 and the Lumia 925". Since the device is a sealed unit, there is a door for the microSD card and the nano SIM.
Internals
The McLaren featured a 2.3 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 quad-core SoC which also contains a Adreno 330 GPU. This SoC is paired with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage, which can be expanded with microSD cards up to 128 GB in size.
Display
McLaren had a 5.5 in (140 mm) LCD display with a resolution of 1080x1920 (Full HD) and a 16:9 aspect ratio. The pixel density of this display is 401 ppi. It is unknown if the display of McLaren was protected with Gorilla Glass, or if it featured any of the features that were found on future flagship Lumias, including double tap to wake or Super Sensitive touch.
The display of McLaren is also reported to incorporate projected-capacitive touch technology, which enables the software-driven "3D Touch" features, including the ability to hover over tiles on the Start screen to expand their contents.
Camera
The McLaren features a PureView-branded rear-facing camera with a resolution of somewhere within the 20 MP range, although since the camera software was never completed for the device, it is only able to take photographs at 8 MP. Like the Lumia 1020, McLaren also had a large camera "hump", which contained Microsoft's propriety optical image stabilization hardware (this hardware was later reduced in size for the Lumia 950 and the Lumia 950 XL).
Software
The Lumia McLaren would have originally been released with Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 with the later potential to upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile. However, due to the 3D Touch technology and software that was incorporated into McLaren, this is unlikely to be ever feasible.
3D Touch
One of McLaren's reputed "killer" features was a technology known as "3D Touch" that allowed the user to interact with the phone using gestures. Sensors contained within the device's body and screen enabled new interactions – which mainly centred around the user hovering their finger over the display in order to reveal certain contextual menus or other additional functions.
On the Start screen, 3D Touch allows the user to hover their finger over a live tile and for that tile to "explode" revealing many smaller tiles contained within – this feature was dubbed MixView. On the near-final prototype hardware, MixView worked with very few apps (only the stock Phone app and Internet Explorer), but the original idea was to allow for developers to make use of exploding live tiles in their own apps.
Other 3D Touch features include the ability to: