StepFun launches its own agent phone, STEPX Neo: in-house Step AOS and Amoo agent, phone, OS and models bundled at 3,999 yuan with 10B tokens a month for a year

Why it matters

【Key points】

On Oct 13, StepFun's device brand STEPX launched its first "LLM-native agent phone", the STEPX Neo Early Edition, in Shanghai. It runs StepFun's agent-native OS Step AOS 1.0 and a personal agent, Amoo, on an unspecified Snapdragon 8-series chip with 16GB+256GB. Pricing bundles hardware, software and models: the phone, Step AOS, the Step Studio tool and Step models cost 3,999 yuan in total, and buyers get a 12-month STEPX Token Plan with 10 billion tokens a month. Pre-orders opened at 21:00 on Oct 13; sales start Oct 16 on JD, Tmall and Douyin.

【Verifiable】

The company release (run by New Weekly, IT Home and Sina Tech) says Step AOS 1.0 builds long-term memory, task scheduling and security into the OS, with separate "user" and "agent" memory domains. On-device models handle simple commands, some offline; cloud models plan multi-app tasks for the device to execute. System capabilities and sensors are open to developers with MCP and A2A support, and Step Studio builds apps, agents and Skills from natural language. StepFun claims integrations with nearly 100 partners including Alipay, Tencent, CapCut, Didi and Meituan. No agent task success rates or other metrics were published.

【Our read】

1. This is the first time a Chinese model lab has shipped its own phone rather than riding on partner hardware, as ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant did. It comes weeks after Step 5 Preview, whose weights StepFun says it will open on Oct 15.

2. The real novelty is pricing: folding roughly 120 billion tokens a year into the device price turns the phone into a carrier for a model subscription, and the "Early Edition" label aims it at developers and makers.

3. The risk is execution. Cross-app tasks depend on third-party hooks of unknown depth, and there is no independent testing yet. X has barely noticed it so far. Hands-on reviews after the Oct 16 launch, especially cross-app task success and permission design, will show whether this is substance or showmanship.