Looking back at Surface Duo’s first year and Surface Duo 2
Surface Neo with optional keyboard
On October the 2nd, 2019 Microsoft broke the internet as well as expectations as to what a Microsoft mobile device could be by announcing two devices that will certainly live on in the minds of tech enthusiasts as two of the strangest devices ever to be released by a major company. The first device was Surface Neo. Panos Panay pulled this little beauty out in front of a crowd that likely had no idea what they were looking at and proceeded to wax poetically about how two screens really are better than one. Surface Neo would run a new fork of Windows called Windows 10x, which much like Surface Neo would never be released… Yet..?
They showed off a strikingly elegant design that met impossibly thin hardware with an equally clean aesthetic that would make the Surface hardware team surely proud. They showed off a tiny keyboard that could be placed on one screen creating a giant trackpad, emoji area and more. They showed how easy it was to finally truly multitask on the go. There was Surface Pen support, there was emails on one screen, fullscreen text on the other. Opening links on one screen only to see it smoothly slide to the other screen to open… It looked like magic.
The man, the myth, the legend.
Even today, we have not seen anything that really looks or feels anything like this design. Well, except the next thing Panos pulled out of his pocket.
After admonishing the crowd in attendance for "doing their jobs," by spoiling nearly everything he had just announced, he uttered the words a tech lover like myself long to hear; “except for one thing.” Surface Duo would be unveiled in a brief, but well produced video which played next and demonstrated much of what Duo was meant to be. A pocketable version of what we just saw with Neo, which shockingly ran Android rather than any in house Windows-based solution. Duo served as a sort of admission that Microsoft needed to concede the mobile software market and adapt while trying to innovate in new ways. They needed to do this with hardware, and that was the promise of Surface Duo.
After that it would be nearly one solid year before we would see this device in any substantial way again. On August 13th, 2020 we got a 35 minute long demo of what Surface Duo was all about and it was nothing short of tantalizing for me. I was sold. Hook, line and sinker as they say. I absolutely could not wait to put my card information in and preorder this device that appeared to be tailored made for me. So I did and then I waited.
On September 10th of the same year I picked up my Duo from a local Best Buy where I arrived nearly half an hour before open so that I could get my Duo as fast as possible and return home to live stream the unboxing. It is at this point that the story can diverge. I can either tell you what everyone else thought, simply repeating their words, or I can tell you what I thought and how my Surface Duo journey went. I will proceed with the latter.
I was stunned. The hardware felt like nothing I had ever felt before. Seriously. If you've not held a Surface Duo you just can't understand what I'm saying. Nothing is this thin. No hinge feels this good. It's impossible for me to convey this in text, photo or video, but Surface Duo hardware is incredible in nearly every way. I would guess that shock and awe got me through the first 4-6 days of use.
The black wallpaper glitch
A little while later I posted my 30+ minute review of Surface Duo and talked about some of the shortcomings that were becoming evident. This thing had bugs. Boy, oh boy, did it have bugs. The gesture navigation was so finnicky I had reverted back to the simpler button navigation method, which I hated. Tossing apps from one screen to the other was hard to do on the first try. The gyroscopically controlled camera switching barely worked and when it did the photos were not great. Sometimes they were horrible. The launcher would freak out in all sorts of strange and confusing ways, your wallpaper would go black randomly, etc, etc.
Ok. Overall, I was still bullish on Duo, despite its shortcomings. I knew it had issues, but when it worked.. There was and still is nothing like it. Panos Panay talked about how having two screens triggers a different level of flow in your work than one large screen split via software and while many took this as garbage PR speak to sell the product, he's right. You will 100% find yourself getting more done on Duo because there are two screens and because it is so easy to use them both. The bugs were annoying, but Duo was bound to get updated, bugs would be squashed and this thing would only get better.
So we thought.
One of many launcher bugs
As days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the bugs really didn't get fixed. Sure, the gestures are pretty much perfect now and the black wallpaper glitch is gone, but a whole slew of new bugs were introduced in their wake! Now, one screen likes to randomly shut off as if it's been folded round back, the launcher still seems unstable, the camera flips around erratically, the keyboard fails to launch, the home gesture stops working for 10-15 seconds at random and to makes matters worse, virtually everyone's USB C port has cracked!
Let's face facts here. As great as Surface Duo is in concept, the execution as been nothing short of half baked. For those of us who really believe in the concept watching this thing flop around like a dying fish has been hard to watch. There is simply so much potential being wasted here.
Leaked Surface Duo 2 showing triple camera
All that being said, I still believe in Duo as a concept. I currently daily drive a Galaxy Z Fold 2 and while it is better than Duo at virtually everything, one place it is certainly not better is in multitasking. To this day nothing beats Duo's ability to run two apps at once. Software splitting is not the same as hardware.
And with all that, we must now look to the future, because a new Surface Duo is on the horizon. We now know that Surface Duo 2 will feature a triple camera array that will simultaneously fix the gyro issues of random screen flipping as well as the overall photo quality.
Should we expect Samsung or Google levels of photographic dominance? Hell no.
Will it be better than pointing a selfie camera at the world and crossing our fingers? Hell yes.
Bigger than that though might be the fact that we won't need to flip the device around in folded over phone mode to swap between selfie and world photos, hoping that the gyro has any clue what we're trying to do. In fact, spanning the camera app across both screens might actually be awesome.
If we assume that the USB C port has been reinforced and we factor in the upgrade to a likely Snapdragon 888, 8GB RAM and NFC added we really only have one dragon left to conquer. Software.
The bad news is that I have absolutely no idea what to expect on that front. I would have thought that the most prolific software company to ever exist would have gotten this part mostly right, but Duo was such a buggy mess that my confidence is fully shaken. Duo 2 will run Android 11 out of the gate, which is good despite the fact that Android 12 Is now in testing. Word is that Android 11 was meant to include many enhancements and improvements for dual screen device which only makes it all the more sad that the only dual screen device still on the market still hasn't gotten that particular update.
Will the fact that Duo 2 will ship with Android 11 be the fact that finally allows Panos Panay to realize his personal dream of pocketable dual screen computational greatness? Only time will tell. Roughly 2 months or so of time because that is when you'll likely be able to get your hands on the second iteration of Surface Duo.