We first got wind of the Nokia McLaren in June 2014, and even though the device was eventually cancelled, we’ve gotten several peeks at it since. Today a new leak is giving us another look at the McLaren, showing the device from just about every angle.
Several photos and even some video of the Nokia McLaren have made their way online. The folks at Windows Central got to spend some time with the successor to the Lumia 1020 (above right) and confirmed the specs of the cancelled Windows Phone. The McLaren runs Windows Phone 8.1 on a 5.5-inch 1920x1080 display and it’s got a 20-megapixel PureView camera with dual LED flash and optical image stabilization. Around front is a 2-megapixel camera, and inside the metal body is 32GB of storage, a microSD slot, 2GB of RAM, and a Snapdragon 800 processor.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the McLaren is its 3D Touch navigation feature. With it, sensors inside the display and on the sides of the phone would know when your finger was approaching the display and activate different features. Live Tiles would explode and show additional info from inside the app, you could answer incoming calls by waving your hand over the display, and you could mute the speakerphone by hovering your hand over the lower half of the screen.
The hardware of this particular McLaren is said to be considered a final build. It’s got a metal body with a large, circular camera hump similar in size to the one found on the Lumia 1020. There’s also a plastic bit at the bottom of the McLaren that holds its antenna.
So why did Nokia and Microsoft kill McLaren? The 3D Touch feature likely played a part, as it’s said that both beta testers and developers found it difficult to understand 3D Touch and its functionality. McLaren’s hardware probably didn’t help its case, either, with the Snapdragon 800 starting to get long in the tooth during its development and McLaren not offering many major new features over the Lumia 1020 outside of 3D Touch.
Despite those shortcomings, McLaren looks like a really nice Windows Phone. I’ve always been a fan of Nokia’s Lumia 900, 920, and 1020 designs, and while I love the colorful polycarbonate that those devices are made of, the metal McLaren looks pretty nice, too. It may not have saved Windows Phone, but the McLaren likely would’ve made a lot of Live Tile lovers happy if it’d been released to the public.
What do you think of the McLaren? For a close look at the phone and to watch some videos of it in action, hit up the Windows Central link below.