Microsoft plans to revive Surface Duo

Is Microsoft secretly working on bringing back its foldable smartphone? Superficial Duo? Perhaps, as a recently filed patent shows, he’s still coming up with ideas for the hinges that are key to making foldable designs work. The unusual hinge design and the way it’s shown in the patent sets it apart from what we’ve come to expect from Microsoft and from foldable devices in general.

Most foldable smartphones use a waterdrop hinge, where the flexible screen forms a teardrop shape where it folds to improve durability and minimize wrinkling, but Microsoft’s patent doesn’t appear to include this familiar design. Instead, the hinge uses different “assembly” sections that slide and flex to make the flexible display easier to move.

It’s a different approach to the Surface Duo and Surface Duo 2, which had two separate screens connected to a central hinge mechanism, and is more like the single-screen system seen on phones like Samsung Galaxy Z Foldable 6 And OnePlus Open. In another departure from the Surface Duo’s design, a patent illustrates a hinge inside a compact foldable device similar to Samsung Galaxy Z flip 6 and so that Motorola Razr 2024.

However, while we’d love to see a new Surface Duo, the smartphone may not be the only device Microsoft plans to use as a hinge. If you look at some of the words used in the patent, it specifically mentions “foldable smartphones” but also mentions “computing devices that include first and second device portions attached to an hinge assembly.” It’s more like a laptop than a phone, which is where Microsoft’s Surface line has been most successful.

However, the patent suggests that foldable smartphones are hampered by reliability issues and that consumers prefer thinner devices to thicker ones. Its patented hinge is designed to solve both of these problems. While it seems like the hinge might be suitable for laptops, the wording leans more toward its use in smaller devices, so you might just want to cover all your bases for patent purposes.

This isn’t the first hinge patent Microsoft has filed either, as in 2019 it had the idea of ​​filling a hinge with liquid or gas to improve durability, and in 2022 it came up with a method to allow a single hinge to fold. the screen is both inward and outward, which it returned to in 2023. Surface Duo 2 was released in 2022 and software support ended at the end of 2024.