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Have you been curious to take a look at Microsoft’s dual screen duo from the inside?
Microsoft offered to send us a device that wasn’t working, but had glass cutaways to show all the circuitry inside.
Weird.
Yeah, let’s take a look.
You know when a new form factor comes along it does have to be elegant or it goes away quick.
But in the in the form of this is new and different but it’s impactful to my life, I think what we see in dual screen moving forward is real.
This is Surface Duo.
The Microsoft Surface duo is Microsoft’s newest return to phones.
It’s a dual screen device that runs Android and has two displays and folds up.
So you could take it with you and it kind of looks like a magic moleskin notebook and when we got this which I would rather take a look at the actual duo But I was really curious to see what was in here and take a look at its features.
The duo has a Snapdragon 855 processor inside but custom Microsoft chips that handle battery management because there are two batteries here, a large one and a small one that are meant to draw and work together to power both of these displays.
Microsoft also has Custom chips inside to run the touch on these displays but also allow Microsoft pen support.
There are also proximity sensors and gyroscopes and accelerometers on both of these displays and all the circuitry goes through to these two really tiny hinges that are on the sides.
They carry the battery management, the power stuff, the processing and all of that.
So that’s a lot of stuff to run through hinges.
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Now it doesn’t have 5g has LTE instead and doesn’t have Wi Fi six.
And these displays while you can’t see them on here will be 5.6 inches each.
There’s going to be a pretty considerable bezel on the Top and bottom.
These are compromises.
To get to the fitness of this device Microsoft may explore adding those features in a future model.
But the goal here was to get to something much more pocketable and comfortable and cool looking.There is a fingerprint sensor here this instance so Side and you can just make it out when I touch it here.
There’s no face ID or any sort of biometrics for face scanning.
There’s only one camera on the inside.
There isn’t any camera on the outside.
There also the standard volume buttons and power buttons over here, but the rest of it feels really sleek and surprisingly kind of button free.
There is a USB C port, but there’s no place to store Microsoft pen.
So if you have one you got to keep it in your pocket, which is a little bit strange.
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The Microsoft Surface duo is covered in Gorilla Glass Glass, the front, the back the insides, this is all Gorilla Glass 5. And it’s a lot of glass on a device.
A part of that is to improve antenna reception, the question of how durable it is?
We start Still don’t know, Microsoft is claiming the hinges rated for years of use, although we don’t know any specifics on exactly how long that is and how long I can keep doing this, but we’re going to find out at some point.
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The only thing I can’t know from holding something like this obviously is how it performs how it functions.
But surprisingly I got a lot out of just seeing how it feels and I was a little surprised that I was wowed by the construction.
I feel like this is something that feels lightweight Like a little notebook, or kind of reminds me of the Nintendo 3ds and the balance of it and the weighted pneus of it feels pretty comfortable in a lot of angles.
Doesn’t feel too top heavy or side heavy.
It feels like you could flip it around.
Have a comfortably stand at just about any angle with no wobble.
I’m a real stickler for things feeling wobbly or Flexi.
And while this is not an actual working model, I still feel like it feels so smooth and good that I hope it’s like this on the final version.
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Microsoft is working on optimizing all of its own apps for this, you’d hope that would take advantage of swiping, throwing things from one display to the other and expanding across.
There’s also a dock at the bottom that shows six apps and you can pair apps together.
Much like what you can do on the iPad when you can pair two.
Two panes of an app together.
You can do those and throw them up together on the same side one per pane.
Now, the four by three display is here are meant to mimic what’s on a tablet.
So that it shouldn’t just feel like an Android device but it should also feel like a tablet or a computer.
And hopefully, that would feel comfortable, web friendly according to Microsoft.
Not jarring.
Again, we are going to have to see about that.
But it will make it easier to run.
Hopefully a lot of the existing Android apps pretty smoothly on this without worrying about special optimization.
However, we do not know how many apps are going to take advantage of really optimizing running on both Screens at once for serve like dual pane apps.
Microsoft’s will maybe Google’s will at some point, but we don’t know when.
And Microsoft seems to be working with a few partners.
One we know about is Amazon And there’s gonna be a Kindle app on this.
That will do two page reading.
That’s really cool.
I’d love to see a lot more of them.
And that’s the kind of chicken and egg thing here is, what you really want is something to have all the apps optimized for this.
And you’re gonna have to wait because Microsoft doesn’t run Android and Google is planning to do dual screen devices but maybe that will take some time for Android apps to really come aboard.
And will that be on a device like this?
Or will it be on a device that’s more like Samsung’s fold devices?
Or will it be something completely different?
Or will Embrace all of them.
Would there be fragmentation?
We just don’t know yet.
And Microsoft is trying to tackle this, not just on this Android device, but also on the Surface Neo, which is its Windows dual screen tablet laptop that’s coming in 2021.
According to Microsoft, the idea is to solve for all of these and come up with a new paradigm.
That’s a big leap.
But Microsoft did that before, right?
So they made the surface and then there was a whole explosion of touchscreen, Windows laptops, and foldables and hybrids, and those have become really cool.
They have become a standard on the market.
Now if you want some perspective from Microsoft themselves, we actually had a chance to speak to panels today and some of the surface engineers to hear some of their insights as to what they were doing here why they were doing it.
We know that the mobile landscape needs to change we there’s so much more that can happen when a person is an immobile.
And you know, we saw that with the two in one we did start, we see the transition into mobility using it to in one it’s lighter, you’d sleeker you can take it where you want.
You can use it on the airplane, you can use it on your lap, it had all these qualities that really pushed mobility and productivity together.
But now what about the thing in your pocket?
What would that be and there’s something metaphorically powerful like when you close it.
You’re kind of done and you’re out and you put it down and maybe you can be present for five minutes.
This is the new Microsoft Surface.
This feeling was very similar when we created surface to start.
It eventually got called a two in one and but when we create it there like this will never replace the laptop.
You don’t, you just need a tablet or a laptop.
You don’t need this other thing.
So many people Scott, they asked the same question.
So is it a new category?
And I just whenever knew how to answer that question, and it turns out yeah, it was a new category.
And it was a new way to think about how to use a product is really, really one.
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Now of course, Microsoft is all about making cloud apps and productivity apps.
So it’s not surprising that they would take this approach.
But Microsoft pushing into these new product categories, whether it be the duo or something like the surface or Microsoft HoloLens.
Are really intriguing.
This device clearly is kind of like a concept car that you can buy.
That’s an interesting device focusing on productivity and making that the main goal even over some of the bleeding edge features that are in phones.
Is that balance a smart one?
I’m interested in the fact that they’re so focused on it being functional.
I feel like that’s a different approach.
We’ll see whether that’s spin or whether that’s something that really results in a superior product soon enough, but this is a peak.
At the inside of the duo and a little perspective on why Microsoft designed this the way it did
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