Alongside the announcement of the Surface Duo, Microsoft announced a new version of Windows - Windows 10X - that would power the upcoming dual-screen device. It’s going to look very familiar to Windows 10, but with some tweaks to improve the UI for dual screened devices.
Windows 10X is part of Microsoft’s push towards a modular version of Windows 10, so 10X should be regarded as a branch of Windows 10 for dual screened devices, just as there are versions of Windows 10 that branch out to support HoloLens, Surface Hub, and Xbox.
Panos Panay, chief product officer of Microsoft Corp., displays the Surface Duo phone, left, and ... [+]
This weekend saw reports of a leaked internal design document around Windows 10X and a number of key areas where 10X will take a different path to the vanilla Windows 10. It also suggested that some of the options in 10X could make their way to the more traditional laptop formats with single screen setups.
We’re clearly in ’assuming Taniyama-Shimura’ territory here, but the suggested features of 10X feel very much in tune with the slow iterative progress that Microsoft is making with Windows 10… Improvements to Windows Hello and the facial recognition system will benefit the entire platform. The inclusion of a more touch friendly ‘modern’ file explorer to fit the UI seen in other UWP apps coded by Microsoft and others is a logical progression.
And we can already see with the limited amount of public time that the Surface Duo has had that the classic Start Menu is becoming more like a smartphone launcher, so the suggested additions of improved local search and recommended content should not come as a surprise.
Philip "Phil" Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Apple Inc., displays the ... [+]
This is where Microsoft is playing a better game than Apple. As witnessed by the recent changes to MacOS with Catalina, Apple is working on an annual tempo of releases and new things need to happen ‘on schedule’ for the preview at WWDC in June and the public availability of the next version of in September. That puts a huge amount of pressure on the development team to keep coming up with something new for marketing for the limited pool of MacOS powered machines. With Catalina needing an almost immediate hot fix because of installation issues you have to ask if this is the right approach.
Microsoft has moved away from this tempo to a more ‘continual’ update cycle for Windows 10, releasing when the code is ready. Although issues can still arise when the code is rolled out to the almost infinite combinations of hardware around the world, Microsoft’s steady pattern of releases offers more reassurance to customers that things will not rapidly change.
For many a dependable and reliable OS is exactly what is needed.
Now read more about the latest potential update to the Surface Pro family…
