Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled new Surface devices with twin-screens that open like books, including a notepad-sized version that will put it back in the smartphone game next year.
Surface Duo was touted as the first device in the lineup to fit into a pants pocket, with two ‘paper-thin’ 5.6-inch screens that unfold and work in harmony with a specially tailored Android operating system. Described as a ‘new category’ of the device, Duo can make telephone calls and run applications designed for Google-backed Android mobile software, which powers most of the world’s smartphones.
“You are going to talk about it as a phone, and I get that. You can text; you can write; you can do what you want, make no mistake this product is a Surface,” Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay said at a Surface event in New York of Duo, which will be available late next year.
The Duo and a separate foldable Neo tablet came as a surprise at a New York event where the tech titan unveiled its latest lineup of Surface computing devices.
Microsoft years earlier surrendered the smartphone market to operating systems from Apple and Google after its own line of Windows-powered handsets failed to gain traction. While it has been emphasizing its cloud computing and other business services, Microsoft still draws considerable revenue from Windows, the software that powers the vast majority of PCs.
