Yesterday, we posted a story on the Lumia 950XL demo units being pulled from the Microsoft Store and returned to corporate. We speculated a bit as to why Microsoft took this step, based on conversation with Microsoft Store staff members who seemed to indicate some issues with the demo units.

A Microsoft spokesperson was kind enough to respond to our request for clarification with the following statement:

Last week’s Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL phones announcements generated huge interest. We made some prototype devices available for a limited time in our retail stores, so that customers could get an early look at our best Windows experience with Windows 10, on our most productive smartphones ever. We’ve now removed the prototypes from the stores as we finalize the experience, and look forward to rolling the phones out next month.

And so, there you have it: the demo units were prototypes, as we indicated, and they’ve headed back to Microsoft proper in anticipation of shipping products to be available for purchase in November. That makes perfect sense to us, although we have to say that a little notice would have been appreciated.

As always, we’re grateful that Microsoft is so quick to clear things up, and we’re looking forward to some excellent flagship smartphones in the 950/950XL.

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