Seeing the Surface Hub 2 reveal offered a glimpse at Windows' dynamic multi-panel future, imagine if you could fold that display and put it in your pocket?
After watching the Surface Hub 2 reveal yesterday, I felt like I was peering into the future. Surface reveal ads have become a bit of a phenomenon unto themselves, but for some reason, I think the Hub 2 has been the most captivating for me so far, even though I'm nowhere near the target audience.
The Surface Hub 2 is a boardroom display on steroids. It features rotational capabilities, inking, seamless integration with multiple Hubs and other Surface products, and can offer full-body Skype conversations as if you were in the same room. Smart screens like this aren't exactly new, but most of them frankly suck, with weak capabilities designed to meet education department budgets. Indeed, the Hub 2 is as niche as they come, but clearly, Microsoft sees an opportunity here. Perhaps they also see a similar niche opportunity with Andromeda.
The rumored Surface "Andromeda" is the near-mythical folding phone-tablet-thing that we've been writing about for what feels like forever at this point. Numerous small leaks, hints in OS code, and patent filings seem to point towards a type of tablet, comprised of two displays that connect at the middle. Since the Surface Hub 2 runs on WCOS/CShell, in a sense, it's offering the first glimpse at a Windows built specifically with multi-display use-cases in mind, such as the folding phone. Of course, you can use multi-monitors with Windows 10 today, but it's not always seamless, nor is it designed with apps in mind, to leverage all of those displays simultaneously. Andromeda, presumably, will be.
That creates various compelling compute scenarios that really got me thinking recently, and I did some (bad) doodles on my Surface Book 2 to explore the possibilities.
Full story from the WindowsCentral blog...
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