Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Hands-on with Microsoft’s Future Foldables!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here, techtober continues second video of the day today uh, and this is a bit of a different sort of video. Typically, what i’d be covering in impressions and first hands on is things that are coming out right now or about to come out. This video is a little more of what microsoft has showed me. That’S not coming out this year, it’s coming out next year and it has uh sort of a still being worked on status, so there are no official specs yet, but this is future stuff and microsoft is a huge company, as you know, so i went up to Redmond near seattle, in their headquarters and there’s dozens and dozens of labs and experimental areas that are not normally shown to the public. I saw material labs where they come up with things like the exact thickness and texture of their fabric on the surface laptops and the rubber on their headphones, where they make prototypes and new iterations of products that they’re putting together. And i even got to spend some time in the guinness world record quietest room in the world, one of several anechoic chambers, they’ve built and used to do noise testing. So out of these microsoft, labs they’ve showed two things: two future products for next year.
One is surface pro neo and the other is surface pro duo. So, let’s start with the surface neo, it’s a tablet, sized dual screen, foldable super thin and, with this 360 degree hinge so just taking a step back for a second we’ve seen different ways to do. Foldables right we have the galaxy fold way, which is the folding screen on the inside. You put a screen on the outside.
That’S the way samsung’s chosen to do it or maybe folding out like the huawei mate x, that doesn’t quite exist yet or the royale flex. Pi that barely exists, or even vertical foldables, like the motorola razer mockups, but the real magic here with the surface neo is this 360 degree hinge. So this is a different way of thinking about it, so it goes from folded, shut to open, but then folds all the way around, so you can use it as a single screen or you can fold it out flat and use both screens. At the same time, there is a bezel in between, so it’s not a true foldable display, but the device itself is foldable and as they’re showing it to me and explaining it to me. You know this is microsoft’s chief product officer and legendary presenter, panos paine and he’s showing it to me and i’m realizing, even though this isn’t technically a folding screen.
It has a lot of the other upsides of various versions of foldables we’ve seen so, if you can deal with that, bezel you get the inside screen, also being the outside screen, and the outside screen is the inside screen and it avoids having to do really any Of the complicated folding display magic altogether, that’s been so tricky and then durability is also safer, because you can cover both sides and protect it when you’re done using it and throw it in a bag or something. And then you don’t have to worry about folding it too far in the wrong direction, because it folds completely all the way around 360 degrees. I think i would only really have to worry about and you saw it.
It’S super thin uh, like twisting durability, uh, and i wasn’t gon na test that just because this is a super, precious prototype and we’re just getting our first look at it. But the thinness really made me think about that and battery life, no idea what a device! This thin could possibly pack in terms of battery when you’re looking at mostly screen, but those are the two things i worry about. This prototype also had magnets in it and they talked a lot about these magnets on stage. You can have this handy little tiny keyboard that you slap onto the bottom and carry around with it and anytime. You want to use it, you can swing it around to the front, and now you have a real physical keyboard and the os detects. What you did with those magnets and gives you a special sort of ui like a touch bar on the bottom display, or you can use it as a track pad.
That’S really clever, and this is all coming from. What’S called windows 10 x, so basically a fork of windows designed specifically for this new dual screen form factor. I think i’m just going to call it dual screen.
So it’s going to manage. You know continuity between the two sides. If you open something on one side and it windows out to the other screen, all the sorts of things like that and the magnet is also good for holding that surface slim pen as well, which has magnets inside so it can be clamped on the outside.
If you just want to keep it there, but it also can just sit there and chill on the back if you’re not using it. So this was fascinating. I was i was impressed by and intrigued by the whole 360 degree hinge surface neo, dual screen, folding action idea.
It kind of reminds me of something a lot of you guys have been sending me. I think it’s a sort of phone designer mock-up of like the dream form factor for laptops over the past couple days, but there was one more thing too, there’s room for something: a bit smaller, more portable pocketable, even – and that would be where we saw the surface Duo, so the surface duo is like a pocket version of the neo, so now it’s a pair of smaller, relatively 5.5 inch screens next to each other again with a small bezel in the middle that make it sort of taller or longer or wider. However, you want to say it when it’s unfolded, but same idea here 360 degree hinge fully protected no screen on the outside, so it’s totally safe in your pocket like a normal phone or maybe in a bag and again it’s super thin, which who knows what? That means for battery, but it looks really sleek and the hinge weight was what struck me the most about this prototype form.
Really, if the hinge is a little too loose, folding, it out will not feel secure and it’ll fall over if you try to put it on a table, but if the hinge is too tight, it’s not comfortable to fold and unfold, so the hinge weight was great. Uh felt looked kind of like a bigger version of that motorola razor concept and possibly the most interesting thing they told us is it runs android. So that means microsoft and google working together to create a version of android or some modifications to android that again work better with this dual screen: folding phone concept, the same way that they worked on windows for the surface neo and that’s again to have dual screen.
Apps, you know one app on one screen: one app on the other android is already building in features now for foldables, but i assume this is another continued step in that direction, as microsoft sets its sights on this new future form factor. So i don’t know about you, but i love this. I love the commitment i want to see them really make this.
You know we had a little hiccup there in the beginning of folding phones, but it seems like now we’re back to full steam ahead. As we start to get folding phones shipping, now we have galaxy fold shipping we have the huawei mate x, delayed, but hopefully coming soon and now we have this commitment from microsoft and it seems like we’re back on this wave. So we had, you know: folding phones, with flip phones and now the form factor of the future may actually be big screens getting small and then getting big again. But i’m curious what you think of this 360 degree hinge as a foldable phone concept. Again, it’s not really truly a folding screen and there is a tiny bezel in the middle and the way they use. That might be interesting, but let me know what you think in the comment section below either way. That’S been it just a quick video to share some of this fun future new stuff and again, like i mentioned that interview talking tech with microsoft, ceo satya nadella is coming up, so tech tober continues thanks for watching catch, you guys the next one peace .