Is a Microsoft Surface Phone Coming Next Year?

There have been persistent rumors and speculation about a Microsoft Surface phone recently. Microsoft has always worked successfully with its hardware partners on phones and tablets until this year, when some of them were unpleasantly surprised after the Redmond giant introduced its own tablet dubbed Surface. Many long-time Microsoft partners took this as an attack on their businesses. The Surface premiers on the 25th of October and it is a big step into uncharted territory, competing with Apple's high-end devices and tablets built by the hardware partners, of course. Depending on the success of the Surface tablet, we might actually see a Microsoft-branded phone sometime in 2013.