Five years ago today, Microsoft began shipping its infamous Surface Duo to customers that had pre-ordered it in the United States. It was Microsoft's big return to the smartphone market, with a design and form factor that was supposed to set the stage for a new category of devices that featured dual-screens.
Unfortunately, the Surface Duo was immediately met with criticism from reviewers and early adopters, most of which found the device to be incredibly buggy on the software side. The hardware was also mixed bag, with a beautiful premium design, marred by questionable choices around cameras, silicon, and connectivity.
What really didn't help was the price — $1,400 for an experimental device from a company that has a track record for abandoning hardware that can fit in your pocket was a huge ask, and it was one that most people couldn't commit to. That meant Surface Duo was already on the backfoot, fighting an uphill battle for marketshare and revenue.
It didn't take long for Microsoft to realize that Surface Duo was not going to be the hit they wanted it to be. The product was essentially broken at launch and needed more time in the oven to get the software into a state where it wasn't degrading the overall user experience.
This took way longer than it should have, with updates coming at a slow pace of only once a month. Microsoft failed to communicate with its customer base too, which made it feel like the device had already been abandoned by the company. To this day, Microsoft has never acknowledged that the Surface Duo was buggy.
Instead, it opted to release bug fixes at a leisurely pace without giving anyone any insight as to when said bugs would be addressed. This lack of communication and marketing was Surface Duo's ultimate downfall. It was a device that desperately needed an Insider Program so that Microsoft could remain in communication with the people using it.
Throughout 2021, Microsoft would slash the price of Surface Duo, which did encourage more people to buy and try it out. By the summer of 2021, most of the big software issues has been addressed, though some were never fully fixed and are still an issue even to this day.
The biggest problem that was never fully addressed was touch responsiveness. The original Surface Duo had a terrible touch response issue, to the point where typing fast on it was almost impossible. This was improved over time, but it never got to a point where it was comparable to other smartphones on the market.
Other issues were just hardware dependant, the 60Hz displays felt slow in comparison, the single camera was really not very good, and the lack of 5G and NFC just meant the device was not fit to be used as a daily driver for most people. For a lot of people, Surface Duo became a companion device to their main phone.
Obviously, this wasn't good enough for Microsoft. It was making a phone afterall, and so it would address most of the hardware issues that were a problem on the first-generation with the Surface Duo 2, which launched a year later in October 2021. It had a full camera array, larger battery, 5G connectivity and NFC, and better 90Hz displays.
Surface Duo 2 was an all-round amazing product, and its software was in an exponentially better state compared to the original Surface Duo at launch. However, for many, it was too little too late. Surface Duo 2 sold worse than the first Surface Duo, and even though it was an overall better product, many people had already decided that dual-screen wasn't for them.
Catastrophically, the terrible launch of Surface Duo likely tainted and killed the entire product category. Had Surface Duo been received well and sold in higher numbers, we'd likely have the Surface Neo today. But the poor response to Surface Duo, and the lacklustre sales of Surface Duo 2, almost certainly pushed Microsoft to cancel all future dual-screen hardware plans.
Five years on, it's crazy to think that Microsoft were so open about how it truly believed a new category of hardware was coming in the form of dual-screen devices. The Surface Duo and Surface Neo were supposed to be just the start, but the company tripped at the first hurdle and failed to recover.
The saddest part about all of this? Microsoft was right about dual-screens. A dual-screen smartphone makes a ton more sense than a folding screen one, if only because Android to this day kind of sucks on tablets. Surface Duo made multitasking automatic, with apps opening in dedicated screens and making it feel like you had more space to work with compared to a single folding screen.
Today, Microsoft is once again out of the smartphone market. There are currently no plans to make any more Microsoft or Surface-branded smartphones, likely because the company knows that there's no way anyone would trust them again with a smartphone of any kind. Lumia and Surface Duo ended up with the same fate. A third attempt is undeserved.
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