This is largely related to the thinness of Surface Duo. Microsoft's dual-screen mobile phone is only 4.8 mm thin. When you consider the huge camera bulge on Samsung devices, Microsoft's dual-screen mobile phone is as thick as Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra when it is turned off. As smartphones have become more and more complex in the past decade, mobile phone manufacturers have to make concessions to adapt to larger batteries and antenna arrays to obtain faster data speeds.
Returning to wafer-level devices like Surface Duo has rekindled the surprise of compact mobile technology that I haven't felt for a long time.
The construction quality is impeccable and very helpful. For such a slim mobile phone, no matter how you hold or orient it, the feel of Surface Duo is very strong and balanced. The hinge has reached the perfect midpoint. When it is placed on the table, it is strong and durable enough to stay in place, and smooth and flexible enough to be easily pried open. Turning off Surface Duo will have a pleasant low applause, instead of the glass-to-glass click you might expect; Physical interaction from beginning to end is a kind of enjoyment, and it is the attention to details that makes me eager to use it in the review stage.
Despite this, the proportion of Surface Duo does have some shortcomings, no matter how good the device feels in your hand. The thinness of this device means that Microsoft has no place to install wireless charging or NFC coils for touch payment transactions-these two functions you would expect on a mobile phone that costs $65,438+$0,400.
This also means that it is difficult to keep the equipment cool when it is running. When the Surface Duo is nervous-for example, if you are on a video call and both screens are turned on-you will feel it complaining from time to time because the rear center of the right half of the device heats up quickly and violently.
Critics may regret Microsoft's decision to use two 5.6-inch AMOLED screens on the Surface Duo instead of the Big curved surface screen, but there is a reason for this. In addition to all the obvious advantages of durability and cost saving, and Microsoft hopes that Surface Duo can withstand the severe test of Surface Pen, the dual display design makes this device more suitable for multitasking or two-person interaction. Applications complete tasks faster.
Microsoft prefers to treat every monitor of Duo as a natural window, which is of course the most intuitive way for companies I have heard to promote multi-screen devices. In this sense, the gap caused by the hinge is not important, because in most cases, users do not really encourage users to distribute an application on two different panels.
The only case where two screens are used for one window is especially useful when the Surface Duo is placed on its side. In this posture, two 4:3 and 5.6 inch monitors include an aspect ratio of 8. 1 inch, which is very suitable for scrolling web pages or social media subscriptions.
Nevertheless, I have some doubts about Microsoft's insistence on using the 4:3 screen: most Android applications are not built to take full advantage of the wider aspect ratio, so you will eventually leave a lot of extra space in Spotify and Slack, just to mention two applications. Typing becomes easier by the way that Microsoft breaks down its keyboard into one hand, depending on which side you approach it. However, if the Surface Duo is placed horizontally, the keyboard will become a bit too wide and heavy. When you type at the bottom, the text fields are separated into the top panel 1.
The aspect ratio of 4:3 is also not conducive to watching media, resulting in a large number of black edges on YouTube. In other words, your content will still look good on any 1800 x 1350 display of Surface Duo, because Microsoft has made every effort to ensure that the color temperature and brightness of the two screens are as close as possible. In fact, I noticed that there is no difference in the presentation of applications, videos and games on the two screens of Duo.
This is an important detail that needs to be reiterated, because for dual-screen hardware (such as LG V60 ThinQ 5G), changing the panel is often a persistent problem. Under our exposure meter, we measured the peak brightness of the left display screen is 458 nits, and the peak brightness of the right display screen is 46 1 nits. The colors are also very close. Duo rendered the sRGB color space of 133.9% and 132% on the left and right panels, and the Delta-E color accuracy levels were 0.26 and 0.28 respectively.
No matter how good the grip of Surface Duo is, or how beautiful its display looks, the software experience will always determine the success or failure of this phone. Although Google has updated Android through flexible multi-screen devices for many years, it is still an operating system. In essence, it is not really used for what Microsoft is trying to do here.
Surface Duo entered the fierce competition of flagship mobile phones in 2020 and was launched in 2020. Mobile phones have adopted silicon technology for more than a year, with only 6GB of RAM, which is undoubtedly at the low end of today's high-end mobile phone standards. Considering that the RAM of Samsung Note 20 Ultra is twice that of Surface, and there is a faster Snapdragon 865 Plus CPU, although Samsung's device has only one screen, it tends to multitask less.
On the benchmark test, the score of Surface Duo's multi-core Geekbench 5 is 2862, which is far from the score of 3294 of Note 20 Ultra and 3500 of iPhone 1 1 Pro Max. In terms of graphics, Surface has a total of 1 0,073 frames in the high-end equipment test of Aztec ruins in GFXBench, with 17 frames per second. Compared with Note 20 Ultra( 1, 455 frames) and iPhone11promax (1,657 frames), this is also dwarfed.
If, like many other advanced mobile phones today, you are desperately looking for some kind of well-designed lens array in the appearance of Surface Duo, I regret to inform you that Microsoft has adopted a rather low-key approach to the camera. This dual-screen mobile phone has only one11million pixels above the right half. /2.0 camera, whether you are shooting a vast landscape or taking an impromptu selfie, this is your camera.
Now we can realize that if it is done well, dual-screen devices have great potential, and Microsoft is closer to achieving this goal than anyone before. However, at present, the potential of Surface Duo needs to be improved, and there are too many headaches to be recommended.