Surface Duo is what's right and what's wrong with the folding phone
I'm tapping this little blog post out on a Surface Duo. The first generation device folded in half to a sort of pocket notebook size which feels impossibly thin and light and has really lovely software keyboard feel. I prefer to use the right hand screen than the left. I don’t really know why.
It is delightful.
I've been reaching for it more and more of late and I have to say that as an iPad Mini replacement and reading device it's great.
To those that know me well, this is a pretty big statement. From about 2015 I was all iPad all the time. All day battery, Apple pencil, touch to do inherently tactile things like edit photos and the option to put a sim in the device and be connected all the time were reason enough to leave your laptop at home. The thousands of YouTube videos asking whether it could replace your laptop for everything from video editing to writing agreed, changing the way you work to overcome the limitations of a mobile OS was worth the trade for truly powerful portability.
But then a pandemic hit, we all stayed at home all the time and then an even bigger thing happened, Apple Silicon!
Suddenly my MacBook Air was lighter, thinner, incredibly fast - like 2 1/2 times faster, and I could edit photos using real plugins, work using the full version of the software not a mobile version, type on a keyboard I didn’t have to carry and purchase in addition on a bigger screen with a proper file system. All while spending up to 18 hours away from a power outlet.
It's classic Innovators Dilemma or maybe an unintended consequence, but either way with iPad sales down, it seems like people in general might have found the same as I have. If you have a really performant unrestricted computer, you'll choose that over a restricted device. It's also important to recognise that all the AI goldrush of innovations of the last 18 months has happened on traditional desktop and web platforms, free of the 30% app store taxes and gatekeeping we all got used to over the last decade and a half.
This fact combined with recent malicious compliance on the part of Apple in response the legal regulation leaves a bad taste in the mouth. I’ve switched browsers to Arc away from Safari, have started to look at Linux on an ARM based Thinkpad and even wondered if I could use the Duo as my phone as I consider cutting some of the reliance I’ve built up over 20 years on my friends in Cupertino. Pocket Casts, Simple Note, y’all are looking pretty great right now.
I picked the up the Duo during the pandemic, mostly out of curiosity thinking it would be a nice e-reader. It had already flopped in the market at that point and I managed to get one for less than £300 used. I found reading my books on it with it in airplane mode was very pleasant. I also liked what Casey Neistat said in his review about it looking more civilised than a phone when you open up your device like a little book.
Civilised
But that gets to the point of this whole post. I love using my silly little computer book but having spent time with it in lots of applications I am fairly certain that folding devices are the wrong idea. The right thing to do to create a new thing to sell but from the point of view of utility and getting stuff done, opening something up to use it is annoying, can be fiddly and time consuming when you just want to do something quickly and I’m the only person I know who’s had a folding device and perseveres. I know that’s why these days they all have screens on the outside, but it’s not better than a standard slab phone. It’s more fragile, more likely to have something go wrong and I suspect that a decade from now the folding devices are still going to be a niche. No doubt Apple will have reinvented it by then. I just don’t think they're solving any fundamental problem and as much as I love the iPad and it pains me to say it, in a world that evolved towards big phones, they didn’t either.