![]() It looks sleek, but like the dual-screened Duo phone, the Neo tablet isn’t done. Lenovo has even shown off a prototype for a 13-inch foldable PC. Samsung has shipped one of these foldables, the Galaxy Fold, although its initial launch was deemed an embarrassment. ![]() The Surface Neo and Surface Duo are not “foldables,” the parlance used for an emerging wave of devices with flexible polymer displays. ![]() Even so, they’re not expected to ship until the holiday season of 2020. But they’re also mini Surfaces designed to catapult Microsoft back into mobile. These are throwbacks to the rumored Courier booklet and the more recent Andromeda fever dreams of Panos Panay come to life. One gets the sense that the new Surface Neo tablet and Surface Duo, the un-phone, are now-or-never projects. Licensing its operating system and software to other PC makers is still a much, much bigger business. Microsoft likes to tout the business’ growth numbers-device sales swelled 40 percent year-over-year last fiscal year, and the Surface unit now brings in revenues of around $5.7 billion annually-but Microsoft has a small fraction of the overall PC market. That 2-in-1 Surface still exists, and the lineup grew to include clamshell laptops, uber-expensive all-in-one desktops, and giant digital whiteboards. The hardware team’s answer was a line of 2-in-1 tablets, launched in 2012. ![]() Back in 2010, while Microsoft’s mobile lunch was being eaten by Apple and Google, Panay was instructed to do something with Microsoft’s Surface, originally conceived of as a touchscreen tabletop computer. Last year, Microsoft’s departing chief of Windows, Terry Myerson, said in an exit interview that Microsoft squandered its early opportunities as a differentiated mobile platform, and said it was “so clear in hindsight that the disruption in business model which Android represented was enormous.”īut it wasn’t all bad news for Microsoft in the hardware department. In July 2017, Microsoft stopped supporting Windows Phone. Then, in 2013, Microsoft bought Nokia’s handset business for billions of dollars, part of a bold strategy to own both the hardware and software experience. The early 2010s ushered in the renamed Windows Phone operating system Windows Phone 8 was the first mobile OS from Microsoft to run on the same kernel as its PC OS. When you ask Panay what this thing is, this device with a seam and two side-by-side screens that fold closed like a soft Moleskin notebook, he immediately says, “It’s a Surface.” The company’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, underscores this distinction, saying Microsoft is not entering an existing device category instead, it’s trying to create a new one. Never mind that it doesn't run Windows but Android, the most widely-used smartphone operating system in the world. Or that Panay himself admits he makes what are universally known as a “phone calls” from it. Or that one of the earliest scenes in the marketing video for the thing, with its slow, fetishized swirls of the gadget, shows a woman picking it up to her ear and saying “Hello?” the way you would with, well, you know. Never mind that the thing slips in and out of the pocket of Panay’s salt-and-pepper tweed blazer exactly the way a smartphone would. But Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, doesn’t want you to call it a phone. You can call it a Surface, a mobile product, a dual-screen device, a new kind of 2-in-1, a pathway to the all-important cloud. No matter what you do, do not call the new Surface phone a phone.
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