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See the guts of the Microsoft Surface Duo. There’s an incredible amount of motherboards here.
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Here’s what it looks like with the screens on. The edges are another thin compromise.
Microsoft
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If the Surface Duo were a bit thinner, the USB-C port would not fit.
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Microsoft has marked for us using all the chips. Like most other foldable, there are batteries in both halves and wires that connect everything.
Microsoft
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To get an idea of how different the Duo is, here are the components of an iPhone 11 Pro Max, and you will only see the smallest motherboards in the middle of the image. And that’s not all – these two pieces are actually stacked on top of each other.
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Here is the iPhone 11 Pro chip sandwich as it sits in the assembled phone. You can see that the sandwich (above) is opened in the bottom image, with three planes of chips shown.
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Another shot of CNET’s transparent prototype.
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The fingerprint reader lives on the side here.
Microsoft is definitely marching to the beat of its own drum with the Surface Duo. In a world of smartphones for smartphones and cutting-edge display devices, Microsoft is hitting two transition smartphone screens side by side, pushing dual-app use as the way to use its first self-branded Android device.
Something lost in the initial news shuffle is that the Surface Duo is actually one of the thinnest smartphones ever made. The ill-fated obsession of the mid-2000s resulted in a pair of gimmicky devices named ‘the thinnest smartphone in the world.’ The highlight (low point?) Of the thin war was the Vivo X5Max, which had an astonishing 4.75 mm thickness (and would you believe it still had a headphone jack?). Last week, Microsoft released the Surface Duo specs, and the company simply dropped “4.8mm” as the thickness of the device when it’s open. If you insert the Surface Duo to charge it, the USB-C plug will be thicker than the body of the device.
CNET recently got a look at the Surface Duo’s internals via a non-functional, transparent prototype, and the photos and video show just how far Microsoft went in its fanatical dedication to thin. The Surface Duo has what looks like a single-sided motherboard. All chips are on one side of the board, and the supposedly smooth back seems to press hard on the back of the device.
The one-sided board construction means the, uh, surface area of the Surface motherboard is absolutely massive. The right half of the device is almost all motherboards, and capturing the image in an image editor shows that there is actually more total area dedicated to components than to the battery. It’s really amazing how big the motherboard is, especially when you consider the only extra components in the Duo are the extra screen and wires that connect the two halves. You could argue that the Duo actually has fewer components than most smartphones, because there is only one camera in the entire device.
Double-sided circuit boards are common in most devices, and many smartphone manufacturers have begun to stack circuit boards on top of each other, giving them three or four planes to place chips on. Minimize the surface of the motherboard as much as possible leaving more space for battery, and if you look for a release of a modern smartphone, you will see only the smallest plots reserved for the motherboard, which is now a dense small chip sandwich is.
Ron Amadeo
Thinness will be an important component of foldable smartphones, as charging a device will double the normal thickness. The Galaxy Fold 1 explains this problem perfectly. Unfolded, it’s a pretty normal 7.6mm thick smartphone, but fold it in half and add a little more to the chuck mechanism and you get a 17.1mm brick that you’ll surely notice in the pocket.
Microsoft says it’s Surface Duo net a secondary device, and it wants people to “think about how they want to use the device in their pocket.” Thinness is an important part of pocketability, but it seems that Microsoft got a bit of tunnel vision in the process. When dropped, the Surface Duo can be extremely thin, but it’s also extremely wide. At 93mm, the phone is 10mm wider than one of the widest Android phones ever, the Nexus 6. The Nexus 6 was considered too wide by most people, considering how quickly Motorola pulled itself back from devices of this size. It restricted your mobility because it had to fit in your pocket – if it could even fit in there. I am not sure that building a device with the profile of a salad plate is the best approach for pocket portability.
No one has spent much time with the Surface Duo yet, but the phone will ship September 10th.
