A Chinese company you may have never heard of has just announced that it’s making a smartphone – or at least sourcing one from an ODM. But wait, this is no regular smartphone; it’s the world’s first AI agentic phone. And guess what, it’s being hyped before OpenAI got a chance to hype up its own rumored smartphone.
The company in question is called StepFun – it was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft employees in Shanghai, and the phone they are teasing today is called the StepX Neo. StepFun is no stranger to on-device AI, but they’ve so far provided service integrations to manufacturers like Oppo and Geely.
We’re not sure if the StepX fitness platform is related to this venture in any way, but if it’s not, then it’s quite funny how StepFun couldn’t even be bothered to Google the name it wants to use. Or maybe it wanted it to resemble SpaceX so much that it didn’t care about the fact that there’s an entirely different thing out there that’s also called StepX.
The phone runs Step AOS and has the “personal intelligent agent” Step Amoo on board. Amoo is the thing you talk to, and it’s similar to any other AI chatbot – you talk to it in natural language. The OS allegedly creates a “native runtime environment” for “intelligent agents”, focusing on “the three major bottlenecks of AI agents: memory, decision-making, and execution”. Memory retrieval by the agent is said to take “as little as” 15ms. The agent is allegedly excelling in offline autonomous execution capabilities too.
The AI operations on board aren’t completely on-device, though; they also have access to the cloud for complex tasks while making sure no personal data leaves the phone.
The company’s on-device LLM is called Step Edge, and it claims this ranks first among similar models in 29 authoritative benchmarks, but hasn’t said which benchmarks those are and which models it’s comparing to.
At this point, it’s not clear if Step AOS is actually anything more than a skin on top of Android – we doubt it, but we don’t know yet. StepFun says it’s a combination of Android, Linux, and RTOS, but that doesn’t give us much to go on.
The phone has a dot matrix LED display on the back that’s reminiscent of Nothing phones, and so far, absolutely zero specs have been revealed.
StepFun has, however, announced the first batch of partners for the device, which include a lot of Chinese apps and services like Meituan, Alipay, Amap, Baidu, Didi, Ctrip, and more. And that’s all we know so far about this hype building “announcement” that was mostly buzzwords with little substance.
Maybe this will turn into an actual product one day; maybe it will even be impressive for an “agentic phone”, whatever that means. But for now, it seems like a smaller Chinese AI company trying desperately to get some attention away from the big players, and to claim it was the first in the world to “launch” a smartphone, even though it did no such thing. Not yet, anyway.