Author Topic: Microsoft Surface Duo Review: Double Troubles 2/2  (Read 50 times)

Offline javajolt

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Microsoft Surface Duo Review: Double Troubles 2/2
« on: September 11, 2020, 01:32:25 PM »
◄ part1


The Surface Duo has a single 11-megapixel camera.

Surface Duo Camera

The Surface Duo’s camera is trash. I should talk to you about its redeeming qualities, like the fact that it has a restrained opinion on color balancing that I appreciate after using Samsung’s overly vivid cameras or the fact that you can dual-screen the camera app to see a roll of your selfies on one side while you take pictures with the other. But I can’t.

It’s likely that the camera is yet another casualty of Microsoft’s abiding dedication to thinness for the Surface Duo. Perhaps the 11-megapixel sensor is simply the best that could fit into that thin frame. But if the Google Pixel 4A has taught us anything, it’s that good software can work wonders with mediocre hardware.

Instead, the only wonder I experienced is wondering how to get the camera to work in the first place. Since it’s placed on the inside above one of the screens, taking selfies is easy. Launch the camera, take a photo, smile at the results. Heck, Microsoft even has a passable portrait mode in good lighting conditions — well, passable by 2018 standards, anyway.

But if you want to take a photo of somebody else, you have to rotate the other screen so it becomes a viewfinder. But when you try to do that, there’s a 50/50 chance the viewfinder will be on the wrong side. And getting it to the side is a literal exercise in frustration. You have to keep twisting and tapping the Duo until it figures it out. After all that work, the results are muddy, noisy, and in low light, they’re a mess. Plus, they arrive well after you hit the shutter button.

I would berate this camera on a $300 device. The Surface Duo costs $1,400.

Microsoft should have just called this a webcam. It would have set expectations appropriately. Plus, it’s a great webcam! You can position the Duo’s screen right where you want it and take a call without having to hold the phone. And if you’re sneaky, you can play a game of Holedown on the other screen during your Zoom call. Not that I did that. (I did that.)


The Microsoft Surface Duo is surprisingly pocketable.

Surface Duo Specs and Performance

Much will likely be made of the fact that the Surface Duo has outdated specs. It has last year’s Snapdragon 855 processor and no 5G. I don’t care about any of those things — though, in a couple of years, the lack of 5G may be a minor annoyance. But there’s no denying that the $1,400 price of the Surface Duo certainly isn’t a result of high component costs.

In fact, all of that extra development time with the Snapdragon 855 has yielded some benefits. Microsoft says it was able to heavily optimize its multitasking system in collaboration with Qualcomm, using the 855 as a stable target. I’ll take their word for it that it would have been buggier without that effort.

A more tangible benefit of that optimization time is battery life: it’s pretty good! That’s absolutely not what I expected when I learned that the two batteries inside the Surface Duo add up to a mere 3,577mAh. That’s a paltry number when compared to the number of pixels it’s being asked to light up, and it’s notably less than what many single-screen Android phones have. Yet, I’m consistently making it to the end of the day on a single charge, and standby time is excellent.

If I have one complaint about the specs it’s that the Duo only has 6GB of RAM That’s plenty for your average Android phone, but it’s not enough to keep apps from closing sooner than I’d like in the background. It’s also not quite enough to reliably run two apps at once without one of them getting a hiccup — and the whole point of the Surface Duo is to run two apps at once.

It’s another instance of the Surface Duo not being a great value — 8, 10, and even 12 gigs is the norm for Android devices that cost over a thousand dollars, much less $1,400. The Pixel 4A has the same amount of RAM as the Duo, and it costs $350.


The Microsoft Surface Duo.

The Surface Duo is trying to be a new kind of device — not a phone, not a tablet, but something in between. That project sounds vaguely familiar, actually. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he set up the stakes for that device:

Quote
The question has arisen, lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something in between the laptop and the smartphone? In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks.
It’s unlikely that Microsoft has lit upon an iPad-sized market with the Duo. But despite the bugs, I do think it has made a case for itself as a new kind of device — or at the very least, it has earned a chance to keep a spot in the emerging class of devices that try to fit a larger screen in your pocket by folding it in half in some way.

But a better comparison for the Duo isn’t the iPad; it’s the original Surface tablet. When it was first announced, it wasn’t really ready. It had a bunch of very good ideas, but the execution was bad, and a lot of people just didn’t get what Microsoft was going for. But a few years later, Microsoft finally came through with the Surface Pro 3, which actually achieved what the first Surface was trying to do.

This Surface Duo? It’s not really ready. It has a bunch of good ideas, but the execution is bad in places, and a lot of people aren’t going to get what Microsoft is going for. There are more than enough problems here to keep me from recommending it. Maybe if this didn’t cost fourteen hundred bucks we could be having a different conversation. But it does. And if you want to spend that much on a work phone, the Note 20 Ultra does split-screen, comes with a stylus, has a good camera, and runs all of those Microsoft apps just fine.

But like that first Surface, there are more than a few glimmers of vision and potential in the Surface Duo. Microsoft has the clearest, strongest vision for a new direction in mobile computing that I’ve seen this year, but picking a direction and getting to the destination are still two different things.

Microsoft has gotten knocked out of the pocketable device games at least four times before — from WinCE to PocketPC to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, this company is intimately familiar with failure. But in the Duo, I can see Microsoft learning from all those mistakes, and I’m glad to see the company back in the fight again. I hope that this first Surface Duo isn’t its last round.

Quote
Agree To Continue: Microsoft Surface Duo

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

To use the Microsoft Surface Duo, you must agree to:

• Google Terms of Service

• Google Play Terms of Service

• Google Privacy Policy (included in ToS)

• Install apps and updates: “You agree this device may also automatically download and install updates and apps from Google, your carrier, and your device’s manufacturer, possibly using cellular data.”

• Microsoft Software License and Hardware Warranty & Agreement

• Microsoft’s Required diagnostic data, including “the version of the software installed and whether updates installed correctly.”

The following agreements are optional:

• Use location: “Google may collect location data periodically and use this data in any anonymous way to improve location accuracy and location-based services.”

• Allow scanning for Google: “Allow apps and services to scan for Wi-Fi networks and nearby devices at any time, even when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is off.”

• Send usage and diagnostic data to Google

• App info from your devices for Google

• Contact info from your devices: ”This data may be saved and used in any Google service where you are signed in to give you more personalized experiences. You can see your data, delete it and change your settings at account.google.com”

• Optional diagnostic data for Microsoft

• Microsoft’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy if you sign in to your Microsoft account

Final tally: six mandatory agreements and at least seven optional agreements.
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« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 01:40:01 PM by javajolt »