Dual-Screen Phones Are Dead, and That is Incredibly Unfortunate

With Microsoft moving away from two screens into one massive folding one, the future of the smartphone just got more streamlined and infinitely more unexciting

When I was in high school, a friend of mine bought a new phone and he was very excited about it. This phone was called the Nokia N-Gage. It was a phone that was going to revolutionize mobile gaming and challenge the Game Boy Advance in portable console space. The device ultimately failed due to the need to disassemble the device to play a game and having to hold the device awkwardly to the user’s head to use it as a phone. The N-Gage was not a device with poor ideas but rather one with subpar implementation.

I am reminded of the N-Gage when I think of the dual-screen phone, an idea that seems to be going the way of the dodo bird now that Microsoft has announced that for its third-generation Surface Duo, the company was shifting to a folding screen as opposed to a dual-screen idea. It seems that collectively, the smartphone industry has sided with Samsung’s approach of folding plastic screens as the form factor of the future. But as I think about the Duo and other dual-screen efforts of the past from ZTE and LG, I can’t help but think that like the N-Gage these were not bad ideas but simply misunderstood ones. Ideas that had unrealized potential.