alt Hacker NewsThe people at Microsoft who made the Surface Duo must be feeling pretty weird seeing this. The name, the aspect ratio, the way the UI works, the gestures for setting up split-screen, the "use it as a tiny laptop" mode... It's all things they pioneered.
Not that that's a bad thing. I absolutely loved the Surface Duo, it was my favorite phone until it stopped working correctly, and I hope other Android manufacturers take note of this, not just Samsung. It's just wild to see how similar this new Duo is to the original Duo.
Replies
> the "use it as a tiny laptop" mode... It's all things they pioneered.
This feature is also standard in existing folding phones. It's a pretty obvious feature tbh.
Microsoft also had Windows XP Tablets [1] and also WinCE/PocketPC many years before.
While the Duo is more subtle for some changes, it might show us the "new" Apple where the innovation comes from fine-tuning and getting a mature product to the market.
At least from their presentation, it looks like they sat on the fence and looked at pretty much any good or bad thing that happened during the past years.
Seeing some reviews on the Samsung Fold for example, mentioned the speakers feeling weird as the audio orientation is fixed to the speakers location. Those little details make a difference.
I really hope modern Apple would go back to the details and nuances.
Namewise, I feel like this is the original Duo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo
Apple continues to Microsoftify themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvX3laQlg14
Did we forget about the vaporware Courier?
The difference here is Microsoft didn't have to take the hardware and pivot a new OS onto it at the last minute.
Remember... the Duo was supposed to be a cursed Windows 10-esque device. They brought on Movial to do a pivot to Android, then bought out the porting team in early 2024 to keep working on what they should have released in preparation for the Duo 2 (which is what they actually NEEDED to sell as an Android device at the time, but flopped in doing so).
I returned mine in late 2023. It wasn't the best experience and I was missing out on things like NFC dearly.
[dead]
Good design is inevitable.
In a completely clean room environment where a designer had never seen a folding phone, but had all the context of the iPhone and everything Apple had done, they would develop almost exactly the same design and features.
Designers have also been exploring the concept of foldable devices for literal decades, well before any reached the market. I have an industrial design and technology degree, we did a project in 2005 where we explored the designs around this, looking at the UI, the physical interaction, everything. My design had a similar aspect ratio and size, as I am sure half the student did my year and every other year they ran the project. (the iPhone Duo is about thousand times better than my design though!)
Thats not to say the Microsoft designers didn't do an incredible job, they did, but they were building on decades of design ideation from those that had experimented before them.