Microsoft announced the end of development on its Surface Duo folding smartphone concept the last year and now it’s wrapping up its last software delivery this month, October 21, 2024.
According to the company, the Microsoft Duo 2 will receive its last security update on October 21, 2024, which puts a period on Microsoft’s third major attempt at marketing a first-party smartphone device.
Then end of support for the Surface Duo line up has been well reported for over a year as the company deprioritized a handful of its first party hardware in an effort to consolidate R&D efforts as well as stem some revenue and profit bleeding from that part of its business.
Alongside tossing in the towel on the Surface Duo, Microsoft also scrapped its All-in-One (AIO) Surface Studio, peripherals like the Surface Headphones and earbuds, as well as offloading its docks, mice, and keyboards to a third-party licensee.
The Surface Duo arrived during the early days of folding phone exploration, and it took a drastically divergent approach that combined dual screens to achieve a folding-like experience on a modern smartphone device.
While Microsoft’s concept made sense as an extension of dual screen workstations for PCs, it unfortunately failed as reality against the more accessible single bending screen design of other folding phone manufacturers.
Turns out that both developers and users prefer single app experiences over the more complicated multitasking built in Android devices with limited screen real estate.
Despite the eventuality of the Surface Duo’s demise, Microsoft’s engineering efforts on a variation of the folding phone concept should be reconsidered by current folding phone manufacturers.
The way Microsoft’s custom Android launcher forced multitasking through aesthetics is something that should be reintroduced into Android. The idea that opening one app only opens that app to one side of the screen versus simply expanding it across a larger canvass forcibly encouraged users to add another app to pair alongside the existing one because there was open space available.
Nevertheless, Microsoft seems done with smartphone development for now, but it should be noted that it also took a three-year break from its Windows Phone debacle to the Surface Duo, so never say never.
