Microsoft unveils a foldable Android smartphone called “Surface Duo”
Microsoft finally announced its highly-anticipated Surface Phone called “Surface Duo” with Android at an event in New York City on Wednesday.
“Surface Duo is the first Surface to fit in your pocket. Surface Duo brings together the best of Microsoft productivity experiences, Android apps, and Surface hardware design into a single device you can take anywhere,” Microsoft Product Chief Panos Panay said in a blog post.
Surface Duo, which is a smaller version of Surface Neo, is the company’s first foldable phone that allows to make calls and send text messages. Further, the Surface Duo is a dual-screen phone that runs on the Android operating system. This means the device will run Google Android apps directly from the Play Store.
“You are going to talk about it as a phone, and I get that. You can text; you can write; you can do what you want, make no mistake this product is a Surface,” Panay said at Microsoft’s Surface annual event.
“This product brings together the absolute best of Microsoft, and we’re partnering with Google to bring the absolute best of Android in one product. This is industry-pushing technology.”
The Surface Duo features two “paper-thin” 5.6-inch displays connected by a 360-degree hinge, which expands to form an 8.3-inch tablet. Each display can run a different app and it will be powered by the Snapdragon 855 processor from Qualcomm. It will also support Surface Pen for easy writing and drawing. It comes with USB-C port on the bottom edge of the right screen, a front-facing camera, stereo sound, and support for stylus input.
“With Surface Duo, we are building upon Android to marry cutting edge hardware with familiar software and services,” Panay noted in a statement. “We’re excited to work with developers and the industry to create the next wave of dual-screen computing and unlock a new era of mobile creativity.”
The Surface Duo won’t come out until the holiday season of 2020. Nothing much else is known about the phone other than the one revealed at the event. Also, no pricing details is known for the device. One can expect more hardware and pricing details about the device to be revealed in the coming months.
