All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Microsoft is forcing you to use both screens independently of each other. Tye to force a standard smartphone or tablet methodology on them and your experience will come up short. There is, clearly, a right way and a wrong way to use any of the Duo devices. Yet, if your inclination is to pick up a Duo, open it up as a tablet, and run apps over both screens, it’s simply not going to work out well once you step away from the included first-party apps. Try to scroll through a website and the cognitive load, at least for me, to deal with the strip is just too high. When you try to span YouTube over the two screens, it’s like attending a drive-in movie in a classic VW camper van with a split windshield.

When Google’s Gmail fails to show things working as ordered you know you have issues to deal with. When you have apps that don’t recognise the central bar (and frankly that’s pretty much all of them) you have some usability disasters. Naturally Microsoft’s apps for Android work in this dual screen format incredibly well (as well as the single screen view that you’ll find on every other regular smartphone).

Some apps take advantage of this split by filling one screen with “the list” of things and the other screen with the “content” of each time a list of your email inbox on one side, and the contents of one email on the other, is the easiest example. Microsoft Surface Duo (Ewan Spence) Ewan Spence

Surface duo