Surface Duo … or Surface DOA? (Premium)

At an expensive $1400, Microsoft’s Surface Duo is hard to justify. But let’s examine the firm’s rationalization for this product and try and determine whether it’s a trend-setting design like Surface Pro or an also-ran we’ll barely remember in a few years.

I will say this. I do feel that Microsoft moving into the Android device space makes sense, but my worry is that it could muddy the possibility of future Android devices by coming to market first with a design that may not have staying power. I can easily imagine an Android-powered Surface Pro, for example.

But with its less sophisticated dual-display design, Surface Duo is also launching into a market in which Samsung is shipping not one but two folding display smartphones, and these devices make Duo look decidedly archaic by comparison. The potential advantage for Duo, of course, is reliability: While display hinges are well-understood, folding displays are still a new technology and are by nature fragile and problematic. But impressions matter. And Duo will suffer from any visual comparison with folding display handsets.

OK, enough of my worries. How does Microsoft explain its decision to ship a dual-display Android device that is sort of a phone and sort of not a phone?

I see three primary areas of focus.

A history of innovation. It is very clear that the Surface organization is quite proud of its one stab at immortality: Surface Pro is indeed an iconic design, and it’s fair to say that that “tablet that can replace your laptop” has influenced numerous similar products from the top several PC makers. As Panos Panay puts it, Surface Pro arrived to “some skepticism, but ultimately a new category was born that drove growth for the PC industry.” I assume he means the premium PC market with that “growth” bit, given that PC sales overall fell each year between 2011, the year before Surface Pro debuted, and 2019. And the iconic Surface Pro design we’re referencing here didn’t arrive until version 3 in 2014.

A need to do it again. Of course, Panay and the Surface team have been trying to capture that magic again, and it’s fair to say that they’ve failed each time. Despite the relative success of Surface Pro, Microsoft’s other PC designs have all sold poorly (the exception being derivatives of Surface Pro, like Surface 3 and Surface Go). So with Surface Duo, Microsoft is trying to approach the phone market---or what it calls the market for “the device in your pocket”---in a similarly different way. Surface Duo is to the smartphone what Surface Pro (3 and newer) were/are to the laptop: A different form factor that will drive new use cases.

A problem to be solved. When Microsoft introduced Surface Duo (and Surface Neo) last year, it made vague claims about the advantages of dual displays, including some unsupported nonsense about how such a configuration was better for creation. With a year of refining, Microsoft’s message is at least...