Microsoft showed off its upcoming dual display smartphone, the Surface Duo, at its Surface event last year. The device is expected to be formally announced this fall, and the hype around it is pretty high. So obviously, when the Redmond giant launched the official Surface Duo SDK and emulator for developers yesterday, I downloaded it as well and played around with it a bit. Here’s a quick look at the Microsoft Surface Duo’s software.
This is obviously the most exciting aspect of the Surface Duo, even more so than the fact that this is a Microsoft smartphone running Android. I really wanted to take a look at how apps behave on the dual-screen display, and the ways it might make things easier for users.
This is useful for me because this way, I can open a note-taking app on one screen, and keep all my research-related browser tabs on the other screen. This results not only in being able to see more content at the same time, but also enables easy copy-paste between apps, and (presumably) drag and drop functionality.
Another impressive way of using the dual screens on the Surface Duo would be to open a single app and spread it across the entire two screens; kind of like something you might do on a multi-monitor set-up for a PC.
Microsoft’s To-do app also makes nice use of the two screens, showing your tasks for the day on the right screen, while displaying the main interface of the app on the left.
One thing I’m really impressed with on the Surface Duo software that I checked out is the sheer fluidity of moving an app between the two screens, or making it full screen. There are multiple ways to do this, based on what you’re trying to achieve and whether the app is in the foreground or not.
If the app is in the background, you can simply open the recents menu and drag the app’s window to the screen you want.
Another thing I was really excited to check out were the new wallpapers that Microsoft has designed for the dual-screen display on the Surface Duo. Other than the usual “Microsoft Launcher” wallpapers that you’d find when you install Microsoft Launcher on any Android phone, there are two new wallpapers under a “Surface images” collection.
Out of the box, the Surface Duo will come with Android 10 (at least as of this SDK), and it will bring the stock Android 10 gestures in tow. So you can swipe up on the gesture-pill to go home, swipe-up and hold to open the recent apps menu, and swipe from the left or right edge of the screen to go back.
Since this is a Microsoft smartphone, it obviously comes with SwiftKey out of the box, which is fine because that used to be my keyboard of choice when I was using an Android phone. However, since this is a Microsoft phone, SwiftKey is also slightly more special here.
In SwiftKey settings, there are two new themes called Duo Light and Duo Dark, which are similar to the regular Dark and Light themes in SwiftKey, but with subtle differences all around. The font is cleaner, and it definitely looks better to me.
Apart from those things, the emulator also helps with giving a good look at the over all user interface that the Surface Duo will likely ship with. A lot of the things here are basic stock Android, including the notification shade. The lock screen looks really impressive though, in that wide display with the Surface wallpaper spanning across both screens as you can see in the screenshot below.
There isn’t a lot to test here, since the emulator comes with the absolute barebones. There are no Play Services either, and apps like Netflix weren’t installing, at least on our copy of the emulator.
All in all, using the Surface emulator has made me even more excited to check out the actual Surface Duo smartphone when Microsoft launches it later this year. There’s just so much I want to test on this device. Microsoft is also going to launch an emulator for the Surface Neo dual-screen laptop running Windows 10X next month, and you can rest assured I’m going to check that out as well.
