Like the Fold, the Surface Duo is a device which opens up to reveal an enormous amount of screen real estate, which you can use for getting stuff done in ways you just can’t (or, really, won’t) do on a regular phone.
But where the Fold opens up to reveal one, 7.6-inch folding screen, the Duo opens up to reveal two screens, each 5.8-inches in size, which you can use as a single(ish) 8.3-inch screen when you want to do things like review and markup PDFs using the Surface Slim Pen 2.
(The Pen, incidentally, adds $190 to the already expensive $2319 to $2769 Microsoft wants for the Duo 2. But in for a penny, in for a pound. If you’re getting the phone/thing, you might as well get the Pen, too.)
The Duo can be used like a tiny laptop.
The Fold and the Duo sound like similar concepts, but over the weeks, I’ve come to realise they’re polar opposites. The Fold 3 does have a split-screen mode for its big screen, but in practice you’ll rarely use it, instead using the phone as the mother of all single-tasking devices. The Fold 3 is brilliant for reading books, for instance.
The Duo 2, on the other hand, can be put into single-screen mode, but mostly it wants to be used as a multi-tasking device, with two apps open on the two screens at once, or with one app (such as Outlook) taking up both screens, but using each screen differently.
For instance, Outlook will use the left screen for showing your inbox, and the right screen for showing the contents of the selected email. Or, if you use the Duo 2 in laptop mode, it uses the top screen like a laptop monitor and the bottom screen as the keyboard.
It’s actually a really great concept, better than Samsung’s folding screen in many ways, but there is still some way to go in terms of the execution, it must be said.
Android still doesn’t use two screens all that well. A popup box belonging to one app can appear in front of the other app, for instance; the keyboard can get confused when you switch back and forth between single- and dual-screen mode, to the point where only the right half of the keyboard might be visible, forcing you to choose words made up of only half the letters in the alphabet; and typing in laptop mode is nowhere near as fast as it could and should be.
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