![]() Some aspects of the Duo's hardware are otherworldly. The ergonomics of the Duo-where you either type with one thumb while holding the other half of the device with your other hand, or where you stretch both thumbs across a slightly too wide, folded device-don't help. Now, I've never found touch-screen keyboards to be great for long, in-depth work they're a little confusing and tiring on the fingers. Maybe this is just about reprogramming my muscle memory, but I kept falling back to my laptop to do complicated work. But because you're holding the Duo with both hands, and it's a little large, there's a lot of thumb stretching and repositioning of hands and fingers to get from the tops to the bottoms of the screens. When you're operating multiple windows on a PC, moving between them involves a twitch of the wrist, at most. The two screens can show two different web pagesīear with me here. But something doesn't quite come together, and I think it's a physical thing. It's obvious, from the actual form of the device, how to open an app on each screen, and even the drag-and-drop or drag-and-span gestures of moving apps around is much more obvious than it is on Android or iOS. The Duo makes the virtual physical, with its two screens. iPads and Android tablets can split into virtual windows, but they use systems of unintuitive and often buggy gestures that lead relatively few people to use them, outside of product demos. But none of the major mobile operating systems have figured out a multitasking interface as simple and smooth as the 40-year-old windowing system we use on PCs. My daughter, an artist, draws while texting her friends. My wife, a teacher, does Zoom classes while looking at reference material. I write articles while referring to spec sheets. In 2020, lives and workflows are built around multitasking. ![]() The outside of the Surface Duo has no screen And they work with the $99.99 Surface Pen, whereas Samsung's device has no stylus support. The screens are also tougher-they're real glass, not the flexible "ultra-thin glass" that Samsung uses. Because the screens are separate, the gap between them doesn't give access to the innards of the device, allowing for a much slimmer hinge than on the Galaxy Z Fold 2. The Surface Duo is made of two glass slabs connected by a metal hinge. It's safe to say that the Duo is the first serious attempt at this dual-screen form. But those phones were from lower-profile companies, only appearing on one carrier each, with sluggish performance. I remember the Kyocera Echo and the ZTE Axon M, both failed attempts at something like this form factor. While it costs even more, the $1,999 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 is a much more successful example of a folding phone. It's ambitious, certainly, but it's not entirely successful, with bugs and ergonomic issues that sometimes make the Duo confusing and frustrating to use. Now Microsoft is hoping to do the same thing on a smaller scale with the Surface Duo, a $1,399 phone-tablet that tries to enable those multitasking, productive workflows that never quite happen on your single-screen handset. Microsoft's Surface popularized a new category: the 2-in-1 PC. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.How to Convert YouTube Videos to MP3 Files.How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill.How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.
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