With the launch of the Surface Duo, Microsoft has embraced the Android ecosystem in general and Google’s taste of Android in particular. Anyone familiar with Android devices using Google Mobile Services – probably the vast majority of Android devices for sale in the US and Europe – will recognize many of the apps.
The Surface Duo smartphone display at a Microsoft Corp. product event in New York, USA … [+]
But the Surface Duo also shows just how much Microsoft has embraced the Android ecosystem itself. Following the loss of Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft made its presence in the mobile market by bringing its services to iOS and Android through the app economy.
And you can see that in the initial app loaded from the Surface Duo, Gogole’s core applications are there, but so are Microsoft. Access to Google Mobile Services requires a number of applications pre-installed, such as Gmail and YouTube. The team at WindowsLatest has the list of the 20 Google apps that will ship with the Surface Duo.
What about Microsoft’s Android apps? You’ll find 15 of them in the Duo (assuming you count Office as one and don’t like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the likes as separate apps).
If you take a closer look at the suite of apps, you will see that Microsoft has its own taste of the mobile mainstays. You have Office and Outlook for individual work; you have Teams to work with; have OneDrive for cloud storage; OneNote and ToDo for organizing information; plus News, Authenticator, Bing, LinkedIn, Swiftkey and more.
And yes, Microsoft includes Solitaire. This is actually a Microsoft device!
Not everyone will use all of these applications, there are alternatives that are favored by individual companies; Slack instead of Teams is obvious, as is Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. It is also worth noting that Edge and Outlook will be set up as the managed web browser and email client in the Surface Duo.
While the Surface Duo may be an Android device, it’s an Android device in the world of Microsoft … a world that is probably more connected and usable than any world created by Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile.
Read more now about the Surface Duo going head to head with Apple’s iPhone launch …
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