Two days ago Microsoft unveiled 6 new hardware devices for 2020 (to be available in the market by December 2019) that includes Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro X, Surface Neo, Surface Earbuds and the back to mobile business device Surface Duo. For many manufacturers, the duo tag has pointed to a device with two SIM slots, but for Microsoft the tag indicates that the surface device has two screens, foldable on each other. This makes the Surface Duo a foldable device – the type of a device no one should have a reason to own.
“The Surface phone that has been rumored so often in the past finally materialized, but it’s not what anybody expected. It’s an Android device has two 5.6” screens and bezels that seem to come straight out of 2012”, writes GSMArena. The Surface Duo foldable smartphone runs away from the now standard foldables from Huawei, Samsung and the others. On the contrary, the Surface Duo looks much like two phones joined together through hinges – you know – same way you can take two seperate phones and hold them side by side.
According to Microsoft, having two phones side by side joined together through a hinge means one screen can be used as a screen, while the other screen being turned into a keypad. In that sense, when the Surface Duo is opened up on a landscape mode, and put on a table, it might be made to look like a laptop. This concept should be able to let those who want to use mobile devices for productivity be productive. Gamers too should be happy, as the lower phone can be used as gaming control console. Interestingly and as opposed to the other Surface devices that run on Windows 10, Surface Duo runs on Android.
The specs of Surface Duo seem unknown, only that each of the two screens are 5.6 inches but when joined together the inches come to 8.3. The processor is a Snapdragon 855 chipset, it has USB Type C for charging and data transfer, and it is 4.8 mm thick. This thickness should however be taken with a pinch of salt as it sounds too thin to be true. Currently the world thinnest phone is a card sized smartphone having a thickness of 5.3 mm.
Even before the Surface Duo hits the market, there are those who already don’t like it simply because it is a foldable smartphone, and secondly because such phones have been tried before but didn’t go anywhere.
