The Surface Duo was plagued with several software bugs that impacted the overall experiences. What made things worse is that some of those issues were mirrored in the Surface Duo 2. This made the devices’ over-$1,000 price tags seem a bit optimistic. However, the news broke that the company was looking to launch a less premium version of the Surface Duo that will feature a plastic design and less robust specs. That device has since been canceled.
The plastic Surface Duo was spotted on an eBay posting
While the mid-range Surface Duo was never released, we were able to get a look at what it looked like. According to Windows Central, a since-deleted eBay listing showed this mid-range Surface Duo in all its plastic glory. When it comes to the overall shape of the device, it’s not that different from the main Surface Duos. It still has a rounded rectangular design, and it still opens up to reveal two displays. The main visual difference with the plastic version has to do with the camera bump. The Surface Duo and successor have camera packages that jut straight from the phone’s body. In the case of the plastic version, the camera package gradually rises from the body with a gentle slope. This is not unlike what Oppo is doing with its recent phones. This device was going to feature an upper-mid-range Snapdragon SoC with other modest specs. So, it would have been more of an entry device for the foldable phone life. Since the listing was taken down, we don’t know how the price was going to go, looking at a screenshot, we see that it was able to reach $380. The price would have, undoubtedly, gone much higher, especially since this is a dev unit. While we don’t have a new Surface Duo to look forward to, we know that Microsoft is working on fixing up the ones that are currently on the market. With the tablet optimizations present in Android 12L and Android 13, we should see some better performance from these phones.
