With this year’s CES now at an end, we have a good idea where manufacturers and designers see the future. Success will be found in things that fold. All across the Las Vegas Convention Center were concept laptops which flexed and folded like Optimus Prime in Transformers.
Which puts a huge amount of pressure on Microsoft. It needs to deliver a version of Windows that will allow its partners’ hardware to live up to all the gambles placed in Vegas, by the end of 2020.
Microsoft's Chief Product Officer Panos Panay discusses the Surface Neo, center, and Surface Duo ... [+]
Let’s take a look at the CES successes in the media powered by Microsoft’s Windows 10.
Intel produced a concept device, obviously to show what its chips can do with new laptop forms, but the fact that it was showing off the new chips in a foldable laptop with a single screen taking up all the space, bending round the inside hinge and then down over the space normally associated with the keyboard, is a clear indication that this is a route it is comfortable with.
How about two of Dell’s examples; the ‘Concept Duet’ which shows a twin screen no physical keyboard design, and the ‘Concept Ori’ which is closer to a tablet design that can hinge upwards into a laptop style angle.
While Asus didn’t go for a flexing screen, the Asus ZenBook Duo is based around two screens either side of the hinge, although here the second screen shares the bottom half of the laptop design with a physical keyboard.
The there’s Lenovo’s Thinkpad X1 Fold, which does go with the full screen that curves into thing when closed just as a normal laptop.
Carmen Zlateff, principal program manager lead for the Windows shell team at Microsoft Corp., ... [+]
But there’s a literal twist to all of these innovative laptops. At CES they were running Windows 10 Pro, a workmanlike solution at the concept stage but not yet refined enough to make a seamless foldable or dual screen device feel like magic for the public.
Luckily Microsoft has an answer... Windows 10X.
Windows 10X was announced in October 2019 alongside the dual-screened Surface Neo as the operating system that would power foldable devices - it would help create an ecosystem of devices from Microsoft’s partners. I suspect this is one of the key reasons that the announcement of Windows 10X happened in Q4 2019. It placed Microsoft publicly in the driving seat of foldable laptops, it used the Surface brand to continue pushing innovative form factors and software, and its announcement created a tacit agreement to its partners that it would be ready by the end of 2020,.
All this amounts to pressure. Lots of pressure.
The early announcement of Windows 10X, coupled with the Surface Neo’s release date of Q4 2020, has created a hard deadline for the Windows team to deliver Windows 10X not just to the Surface team at the Redmond Campus, but to Microsoft’s key hardware partners who have shown their hand at CES.
Microsoft has always looked forwards into the future but it usually remains behind closed doors until everything is cooked. With multi- and folding-screen technology, it has decided to share that future vision today. Let’s hope that Microsoft can stay on schedule and meet that promise.
Now read how the Surface team have beaten Apple’s iPad team in one key area…
