The Surface Duo is dead, but its idea is not

Six years ago, Microsoft sold a $1,400 dual-screen phone with no rear camera, no 5G, and buggy software. Three years later, on September 10, 2023, Microsoft officially stopped supporting the Surface Duo, ending one of its most clearly failed hardware experiments. Yet now, I'm reading news that Samsung is preparing to launch a folding device with a shape described as wider and shorter than the familiar Galaxy Z Fold line, reminiscent of the Surface Duo itself. At the same time, Apple is also rumored to launch the first folding iPhone in September 2026. The world's two largest phone companies, almost at the same time, returned to an idea that another technology giant had given up on.

One idea, two types of failure

To understand why this time may be different, I think it is necessary to separate two types of failure that are often combined into one: failure due to wrong ideas, and failure due to poor execution while the underlying technology is not mature enough. Surface Duo falls into the latter category, and worse, it fails in multiple layers at once. Regarding hardware, Surface Duo is not a seamless folding screen in the true sense. It's essentially two separate flat screens, connected together by a hinge, leaving a gap and screen border in the middle each time they are opened. Any app or image that spans the two screens is interrupted by that seam. The device also does not have a rear camera in the first version, and lacks both 5G and NFC, two features that are almost mandatory for a phone in 2020.

Surface Duo that TinhTe had in hand, it was a good idea but not good in terms of execution

Things have changed in six years

The biggest difference between Surface Duo and current folding devices lies in the display panel itself. Samsung, and most likely Apple, use a seamless flexible OLED screen, curved around a hinge hidden just below the display layer, instead of pairing two hard screens next to each other. There's still a visible crease in the middle, but it's a continuous surface, not a gap that cuts the screen in half like the Duo.

After a while, folding screen technology has matured enough to provide a seamless experience Hinge technology has also come a long way. After seven generations of Galaxy Z Fold, Samsung has refined the multi-joint hinge structure enough so that the device folds almost completely flat when closed, and can withstand hundreds of thousands of folds and opens without falling apart, something that was almost non-existent when the Surface Duo was born. It is the maturity of the hinge and screen covering material that allows manufacturers to confidently make thinner devices. With the rumored folding iPhone, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the device will have a 5.5-inch outer screen, an inner screen of about 7.8 inches, equivalent to an iPad mini, and an open thickness of less than 5mm, thinner than the iPhone Air, Apple's current thinnest iPhone model. Such thinness is only possible when batteries, circuit boards and components have shrunk enough compared to six years ago. At the software layer, both Android and iOS now have a much more well-built multitasking platform for large screens than in 2020, from the taskbar supporting multiple windows on Android to what Apple has learned from years of developing multitasking on the iPad. The application programming community has also had a long time to get used to designing interfaces that adapt to large screens, something that was almost non-existent when Duo launched.

When the two biggest companies bet on folding phones

Microsoft is often ahead of its time, but execution is not good. Now what does that leave for Apple and Samsung to do? When the world's two largest phone companies simultaneously consider wide foldable devices as the next flagship direction, it is no longer a niche experiment like the Duo was, but a calculated bet, based on eight years of observing the foldable market since Huawei and Samsung launched their first models in 2019. The remaining question is not whether the technology is ready, because most of the evidence suggests it is, but whether mainstream users, not just geeks, technology, are you willing to pay a significantly higher price in exchange for a phone that is both foldable and light enough to carry every day?