The Surface Duo is a contentious little gadget, with a lot of cool hardware and a lot of glaring issues. One of them is slow software updates. Despite it being Microsoft’s only mobile product, and an expensive one at that, it’s still running the year-old Android 10. A day after announcing the sequel device, Microsoft says it’ll have the original Duo upgraded to Android 11 before the end of this year.
That’s what the company told The Verge, anyway. I dunno if you’ve looked at a calendar lately, perhaps on one side of your two-screened mobile device whilst you watch videos on the other, but there’s just a hair over three months left in 2021. And if Microsoft still needs months of buffer time to get an update ready, even with Android 11 already running on the Duo 2, that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the company’s Android software team.
Microsoft has already committed to three years of software and security updates for the Surface Duo. But as anyone with an LG phone (or really, most Android devices not from Google, Samsung, or OnePlus) can tell you, that doesn’t mean that the updates will be timely. I can’t imagine Microsoft’s lack of hustle to update the original device is a comforting thought to people considering a purchase of the even-more-expensive Duo 2.
