I was interested to see a couple of videos posted to Twitter from ex-Microsoft Principal Design Lead Mike Kruzeniski, who was a key man during the Windows Phone days, 2010 onwards. They're a couple of realistic application UI demos for Windows Phone on dual display devices, which would seem rather pertinent to today, with Surface Duo announced but running Android instead. Again, there's an editorial coming!

There are two videos available on Twitter, but they run through most smartphone uses, from email to ebook reading, from mapping to gaming to shopping:

It definitely didn’t make sense to build this back then, but it was a lot of fun to work on pic.twitter.com/p4VxGkxEnJ

— Mike Kruzeniski (@mkruz) October 4, 2019

Very impressive - although these appear to be captured from an emulator, implying that the software existed and it was then just a question of making the hardware(!), I suspect that what we're seeing is 90% mocked up by a visual animation team. But it's all extremely believable.

As several companies have found in the last 18 months though, actually making a dual-screened or folding device isn't trivial. However, with recent hinge designs and also recent advances in folding displays, this kind of split-screen UI is only going to be seen more and more. And we almost had it a decade ago!!