The Nokia Lumia McLaren is an unreleased smartphone developed by
Nokia
Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...
and
Microsoft Mobile
Microsoft Mobile was a subsidiary of Microsoft involved in the development and manufacturing of mobile phones. Based in Espoo, Finland, it was established in 2014 following the acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services division by Microsoft i ...
that utilised a new technology dubbed "3D Touch" (a feature that is unrelated and not the same as the
3D Touch
Force Touch is a haptic technology developed by Apple Inc. that enables trackpads and touchscreens to distinguish between various levels of force being applied to their surfaces. It uses pressure sensors to add another method of input to Apple's ...
feature that was introduced on the
iPhone 6s in late-2015).
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. Had the phone not been cancelled, Lumia McLaren could have officially been launched as successor for Lumia 1020. The cancellation left Lumia 1020 have no direct successor and no new Lumia flagship until October 2015. Lumia 1020 only got its "spiritual successor" in February 2019 with the launch of
Nokia 9 PureView
The Nokia 9 PureView is a Nokia-branded flagship smartphone developed by HMD Global. It was introduced at the 2019 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain as a successor to the Nokia 8 Sirocco. It alludes to Nokia's previous camera-cen ...
.
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. However, apart from grey ones, silver and full black prototypes have also been built. Daniel Rubino of Windows Central described the device as a "cross between the
Lumia 1020
The Nokia Lumia 1020 (known as Lumia 909 during development) is a smartphone developed by Nokia, first unveiled on 11 July 2013 at a Nokia event in New York. It runs Windows Phone 8, but is also Windows Phone 8.1 ready. It contains Nokia's Pure ...
and the
Lumia 925
Nokia Lumia 925 is a smartphone developed by Nokia that runs Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 operating system. It was announced on 14 May 2013, described as a "new interpretation" of the Nokia Lumia 920, and released in June 2013. A separate 925T ver ...
". Since the device is a sealed unit, there is a door for the
microSD
Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices.
The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...
card and the
nano SIM. However, in some prototypes with earlier RM-XXXX number, but newer hardware revision number (0151 instead of the 0101 ones that have one door only), there are two separate doors, one for the nanoSIM and one for the storage expansion card. Some RM-XXXX numbers include the RM-1001, RM-1002, RM-1003, RM-1004, RM-1050, RM-1051 and RM-1052.
Internals
The McLaren featured a 2.3
GHz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is sā1, meaning that one he ...
Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974
quad-core
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...
SoC which also contains an
Adreno
Adreno is a series of graphics processing unit (GPU) semiconductor intellectual property cores developed by Qualcomm and used in many of their SoCs.
History
Adreno (an anagram of AMD's graphic card brand '' Radeon''), was originally developed ...
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. It also comes with the non-replaceable Microsoft Battery BV-F4A, 2600mAh.
Display
McLaren had a 5.5 in (140 mm)
LCD display with a resolution of 1080x1920 (
Full HD
1080p (1920Ć1080 progressively displayed pixels; also known as Full HD or FHD, and BT.709) is a set of HDTV high-definition video modes characterized by 1,920 pixels displayed across the screen horizontally and 1,080 pixels down the screen verti ...
) and a 16:9
aspect ratio. The pixel density of this display is 401 ppi. It is unknown which protective glass comes with the Lumia 1030 (probably Gorilla Glass 3 or later). Depending on the firmware installed, it also comes with features that were found on other Lumias, like Glance Screen, double tap and super-sensitive touch (use with gloves).
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
Nokia PureView is the branding of a combination of technologies used in cameras of Nokia-branded smartphones, and previously, in phones by Microsoft Mobile. PureView was first introduced with Nokia 808 PureView.
Hardware
PureView cameras have ...
-branded rear-facing camera with a resolution of somewhere within the 20 MP range. The in-built camera software, just like on the lumia 1020 shoots only in PureView mode (5-8MP range), with only few settings. However, with the Lumia Camera, the maximum resolution goes up to about 19-20MP (4:3), with the possibility to capture double images as well, like on the lumia 1020 (5MP PureView jpeg + full resolution jpeg or 5MP jpeg + full resolution dng, which is RAW image). Like the Lumia 1020, McLaren also had a large camera "hump", which contained Microsoft's propriety
optical image stabilization
Image stabilization (IS) is a family of techniques that reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or other imaging device during exposure.
Generally, it compensates for pan and tilt (angular movement, equivalent to yaw and pit ...
hardware (this hardware was later reduced in size for the
Lumia 950
Microsoft Lumia 950 (codenamed ''Talkman'', a reference to the old Nokia Talkman) is a smartphone developed by Microsoft, officially revealed on 6 October 2015 alongside the larger Lumia 950 XL. The phone was first released on AT&T in the United ...
and the
Lumia 950 XL
The Microsoft Lumia 950 XL (codenamed ''Cityman'', a reference to the old Nokia Cityman) is a smartphone developed by Microsoft, officially revealed on October 6, 2015 and released on November 20, 2015 alongside the smaller Lumia 950. The Lumia ...
).
Software
The Lumia McLaren would have originally been released with
Windows Phone 8.1
Windows Phone 8.1 is the discontinued third generation of Microsoft's Windows Phone mobile operating system, succeeding Windows Phone 8. Rolled out at Microsoft's Build Conference in San Francisco, California, on April 2, 2014, it was released ...
Update 1 with the later potential to upgrade to
Windows 10 Mobile
Windows 10 Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft. First released in 2015, it is a successor to Windows Phone 8.1, but was marketed by Microsoft as being an edition of its PC operating system Windows 10.
Wind ...
. 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 ā 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
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
), 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:
* keep the screen of the phone on whilst the user is holding the device
* lock the rotation of the screen if the phone is held in a certain way
* silence incoming calls by gripping the phone or waving a hand over the display
* answer incoming calls by also waving a hand
* mute the speakerphone by holding a hand over the lower half of the display (where the in-built microphone is located)
* display additional UI elements only when a finger is close to the respective area of the display
* adapt the user interface depending on how the user holds the device
* provide gesture-based controls for games
References
{{Reflist
Microsoft hardware
Lumia McLaren
Smartphones