The Lumia 950 line was supposed to have a bunch of cool gestures

Microsoft’s Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL are some really good smartphones when it comes to the hardware. The cameras of the devices were impressive, the build quality itself was really good, and the overall look and feel were pretty decent, too. Both of the devices, unfortunately, didn’t have anything unique apart from Continuum for phones and Windows Hello (both of which arrived on other new Windows 10 Mobile devices at a later date). Now, it looks like Microsoft actually left out a big feature from the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL before launch.

According to Microsoft enthusiasts @tfwboredom and @gus33000, the Lumia 950 family was supposed to have a handful of really cool gestures. Even though the gestures aren’t a major feature, they still sound really nice on paper. For instance, there’s a gesture which would keep your device’s screen on when you’re holding the phone — as a result, it wouldn’t automatically timeout and you can keep reading or look at a picture without having to keep touching the display to prevent it from dimming. There’s also a gesture which would turn on the speaker when you place the phone face up when you are in a call, and it would automatically turn it off when you raise the phone back up to your ear. Pretty cool stuff.

You can see the full list of gestures in the screenshots above, and they are definitely quite impressive. Obviously, it isn’t clear why these features never made it to the Lumia 950 family — in fact, even the Double Tap To Wake Up feature wasn’t available during the initial release of the Lumia 950 family. Microsoft released the feature several months later with a firmware update, but the other gestures were never available for the Lumia 950 family which is really disappointing to see. However, the reason Double Tap To Wake was delayed is because of the initial removable of the above gestures.

Microsoft actually has been testing some of these gestures for a while now — we actually reported about a couple of the gestures being tested for Windows Phone back in August 2015. Some of these gestures are also quite similar to the gestures we were supposed to see on the canceled McLaren device.

Hopefully Microsoft will include these gestures on their future handsets, but don’t get your hopes up yet.