From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
StepFun launched the STEPX Neo on Oct. 13, a 3,999-yuan phone, about $560, running its Step AOS 1.0 operating system with a built-in AI agent called Amoo.
Pre-orders opened on JD.com, Tmall and Douyin, and the price includes 12 months of AI access at 100 billion tokens a month.
Nearly 100 partners including Alipay and Tencent have signed on, after ByteDance's Doubao phone agent drew blocks from major Chinese apps in December.
StepFun, a Chinese AI startup backed by Tencent, launched the STEPX Neo, a phone whose AI agent is built into the operating system itself instead of sitting in an app.
The operating system is the core software that runs a phone, like iOS or Android. Pre-orders opened that evening at 3,999 yuan, about $560, with a first sales event on Oct. 16.
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Instead of opening a ride-hailing app, typing an address and picking a car, you tell the phone where you want to go, and its agent—software that takes a goal and carries it out on its own—handles the remaining steps.
StepFun told the launch audience that in the agent era AI is no longer an add-on to a smartphone but the product itself.
StepFun first showed the agent, the operating system, and the STEPX brand in Shanghai on July 13, without a price or sales date. The company said at the time that conventional smartphone software was never built for autonomous task execution.
Siri and Gemini are assistants that live inside iOS and Android. StepFun says its Step AOS 1.0 was instead built from scratch for the agent, with long-term memory, task scheduling, and security controls in the base layer. The company describes the system as a mix of Android, Linux, and real-time operating system components.
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The agent, called Amoo, keeps one memory for the user's facts, habits, and preferences and another for what it has learned about carrying out tasks. Simple commands like setting an alarm run on a small model inside the phone, some of them offline, while harder requests that span several apps go to a larger model in the cloud. A second MiniLED screen on the back shows what Amoo is doing.