The odd thing is Microsoft have ALWAYS made great hardware. I used their keyboards and mice exclusively for….well, more than a decade, even on Macs. Then they kind of lost their way and went way too far into design weirdness and, bizarrely, decided they weren’t going to generally support Bluetooth any more… And the surface laptops have always been good too, although generally not quite as good as Apple’s for roughly the same price. But these days a Surface Pro is a ruddy good laptop by any standard, I would happily recommend them to anyone.
So I am absolutely certain that, in a year to 18 months when they finally make it to market, they will be bombproof hardware. And the Duo will be vanilla Android, which will be fine. But the whole ‘custom version of Windows’ thing for the Duo is just ringing massive alarm bells, because every time Microsoft has done that they’ve messed it up. And I have this horrible premonition that a lot of the cool stuff for the Duo will need to be specifically coded for, and there just won’t be enough Duos in the wild to justify doing it initially and they won’t sell without software and so they’ll end up stuck in a horrible catch-22.
Well, either way, we’ve got quite a while to wait and I’m sure we’ll see continuous ‘leaks’ as they evolve towards final release products (which, btw, what we’ve seen already definitely is not). Fingers crossed, basically!
