Android 13 on the Surface Duo

Android / Linux Android OS
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I used Shane Craig’s video walkthrough to install the DSU image. It’s almost like running a virtual machine, so there’s no partitioning or big warnings about bricking your phone if you do it wrong.
(708) How to install the Pixel Experience Android 13 ROM on your Surface Duo (Important pinned comment) - YouTube

Since this went on a Duo generously shared for the purpose of installing stuff, I’m tempted to flash it and have it run only android 13 (and also maybe Windows 10x) but the instructions to do so are slim and involve a few things I’m not familiar with.

My impression after playing with it for 30 minutes - it’s android. Face unlock works, so that’s cool. And it comes with some neat wallpapers. But other than that, it’s just Android with all the same Android apps, same gestures, similar multitasking to what the Fold got with the dock bar. OneNote works, pen writes nicely. It treats the Duo as a single screen tablet, so everything opens spanned, but many apps split nicely down the middle in landscape on a tablet anyway. Gmail looks nice. I’ll play with it more, but for now, nothing jumps out as being super awesomer than microsoft’s Android with handles to move things between screens.

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I think this would be a great experiment, but wonder if Win10x is mostly a dead end at this point? :thinking:

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I tried 10X once before. It’s interesting, but very bare bones. I was able to get a fair number of apps working, but it didn’t feel fully baked enough to really use.

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Okay, here’s the biggest difference and why I think microsoft got it right - when everything always opens spanned, it means apps that force portrait will open across both screens and force you to turn the Duo sideway and now you have a line down the middle. If I’m holding my device like a book, I want it to stay that way when I open an app. With microsoft’s android, it does. The app opens on one screen in portrait mode. To get that on Pixel experience ROM, I’d have to turn it sideways and pick another app to open next to it then turn the Duo back over to book mode, where I had it when I opened the app the first time.

The Duo feels so nice in one hand open like a book. Microsoft nailed making the software work on that form factor.

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