1562

An actual demo of it

1563

Man, the bezels on that frickin’ thing.

1565

I’m going to agree with the whole “applaud the innovation” take on this. Just like folding phones, you gotta start somewhere. The iPhone didn’t just miraculously appear in 2007 - It was a product of all the innovation in smartphones starting with weird implementations like the Palm Treo in 2000.

I don’t think the Duo will be successful taken on its own. But Microsoft, and the rest of the industry, will learn from it. It’s not like it doesn’t make any sense at all in theory.

1566

I’m not going to buy a first gen of this but damn the official video walkthrough for press shows a ton of cool scenarios I would absolutely use myself:

They really put a lot of thought into how it handles both screens, in different orientations, including how the keyboard works. Even for apps which weren’t updated at all to take advantage of any dual screen APIs.

And the Your Phone PC app stuff seems really cool.

1567

I agree with this take. That Microsoft demo video is pretty impressive, especially if everything works as advertised. If it had a 512 GB option (or a microsd slot), I would purchase this out of the gate to at least see whether it lives up to expectations.

1568

The win 10 your phone app works on all Android phones, FYI. Doesn’t offer much for iOS because Apple won’t allow it.

In theory the Dell mobile access app is supposed to work better for iOS even on a non Dell computer but I never got that to work well.

So in the end I run a MacOS VM exclusively to iMessage from my windows desktop at home. Silly use of resources but it has the advantage of actually working.

1569

The one use case I haven’t seen in the demos (but I’m not watching the 35 minute demo just to find out, sorry i’m lazy) is if the duo allows you to span an app across both windows. The most common use I have for my tablet is watching videos and reading books. Am I stuck doing that on a single screen, or do I get a ugly bezel in the middle of my video? For books it might be fine as you could display a left/right page for some formats, but for other applications like science papers where I want to look at one page across the entire display to look at a figure, not so good. I guess the same problem applies to looking at photos too - are you stuck on one small display?

1570

This is just the new business phone and i think it will be great for business customers. Right now the phone market is more or less oriented toward consumers and content consumption only, so business customers will get an iPad w/ cellular for more business oriented features. I would be surprised if there were widespread use of MS Office on a phone, for ex.,

The problem is that it’s restricted mostly to MS Office apps and a smattering of other productivity based software compatible with Android. So it’s not really meant for running 3rd party larger scale industry softwares.

So i think this is pretty awesome from a technical point of view. But things Office is just the connecting tissue of the programs i run, and i don’t really need anywhere access to Office. Probably the most i could use it for would be as a PDF viewer… but tbh a larger iPad would still be better in that pure role.

1571

The video shows a lot of this. You can:

  • Span an app between both screens with the bezel in the middle
  • Show an app portrait or landscape on just one screen
  • Run two different apps on each screen
  • Set up “app pairs” which you want to always launch together (like notes + YouTube, or maps + trail guide, etc.)
  • Kindle updated their app to properly use both screens, like opening a book and seeing one page on each screen

The device is also smart enough to do things like this:

  • If it’s open for you see both screens, clicking a link on one screen will open the the result on the other screen
  • if it’s folded back on itself so you’re only looking at one screen like a normal phone, it knows not to open links or apps on the other screen you can’t see
1572

Give me a non-phone version of this for ~$400 and I would get it without hesitation. I have been wanting to try an Android tablet again, so this would be a neat portable one that I could carry around at work. Basically it would be a OneNote machine for me. I get they need to recover development costs, but I can’t for the life of me understand why this is $1,400.

1573

Agreed. I love MS toys–bought the first gen Surface and a third gen Surface. Also used a Windows phone until it just wasn’t feasible any more. But I cannot see shelling out $1400 for this.

1574

Yeah, much like the original Surface itself, I hope the Duo inspires other companies to take this form factor and run with it. I’d love a non-cellular tablet in this form factor.

For all the demos shown in that 30 minute video, it seems much more enticing to me than what the Galaxy Fold is trying to do. I don’t really need one huge screen - and while the Fold could work similarly to the Duo in running two apps side by side, there’s something about the entirely discreet screens that seems more personally aligned with what I’d like to see.

1575

I freaking love this idea, it looks awesome. But yeah, at $1600 with storage and a pen, I’m not there yet.

1576

Yup, the phone part isn’t really the attraction in my case. Using this with a pen looks more compact and feature rich compared to my iPad Pro since I am using the iPad with Office products for the most part and take notes with OneNote. They just need to get the storage to 512GB so those of use that store large music files have space!

1577

$111 for the pen? (That’s with a 33% discount for buying it with the Duo, it’s actually $15 more expensive than the Apple Pencil.) They really are going full Apple on pricing. I guess it worked for their Surface line, which isn’t exactly cheap, so why not try it here?

1578

It might be the best kindle ever. But… i specced it out and it was $2000. Clearly this is aimed first at C-suite types, whose main computing needs is management.

It also does a good job at making the cellular iPad Mini 5 suddenly seem like a great deal. Quite the accomplishment!

Sarcasm aside I would 100% get one if I could justify it - but $2k is pretty rich and i’m the opposite of flush right now. It does look like a nice piece of engineering though.

1579

Wow. Are you me? I tick all those boxes!

1580

So this is Microsoft DS rather than Nintendo DS?

But but but I can already do those DS things on my ipad…

1581

But can you fold your iPad? Or drill holes in it?

1582