Ubuntu's Snappy-Core grew out of their brief run at the phone: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/devices

It has some parallels with Microsoft's strategy and could roll back into phones as just another device. And I think that getting a platform that works from embedded to server clusters has a good chance of how provisioning phones works ten years from now.

There's really nothing magical about phones. It's some compute cores, a bit of memory, some radios, a battery and a display. The only distinguishing feature of a phone is how the radio is tuned.