Microsoft's Dual-Screen Duo Is Here. The Timing's Not Great

Last October, during a long day of closed-door sessions and windowless-lab meetings with executives and product managers, the kind of closeness that would now make me shudder in the context of a pandemic, Microsoft revealed its dual-screened phone. The joke at the time was that Microsoft refused to call the Surface Duo a phone, identifying it instead as a brand-new kind of hybrid device, even though it runs Android and makes phone calls.

Update! The company’s still not calling it a phone. But Microsoft has managed to keep its promise of shipping the Surface Duo by the 2020 holiday season. It goes on sale today and will ship early next month.

In a virtual briefing hosted yesterday by Microsoft communications executive Frank Shaw and chief product officer Panos Panay, the duo (pun intended) tossed to colleagues in neighboring rooms and to designers standing six feet apart in a lab, all of whom tried valiantly to make a case for this hybrid product. It is a sleek, gleaming little space-white booklet with a hinge—Panay calls it “one of the sexiest devices we’ve built”—and no doubt strange. It also costs $1,399.