Microsoft’s unreleased Surface Duo foldable with Windows is on sale, but good luck trying to buy it

Microsoft persistently dabbled with mobile phones for almost the entirety of the 2010s — and for a couple of years after that, too. While its Windows Phone operating system garnered both appreciation and criticism, a project that was critiqued mainly was its category of folding devices, known as the Surface Duo.

The Surface Duo was a folding phone, but unlike the Galaxy Z Fold devices, it came with two separate screens for running multiple applications side-by-side. The first generation (yes, there were more than one!) Surface Duo felt like a prototype and offered a jarring software experience full of bugs. The second generation came with slight upgrades, but felt outmoded by true foldables that were starting to take over the market. A third generation aimed to solve that, but it was cancelled before it could take form.

Notably, both of the Surface Duo models that existed ran Android. But there was a third — actually, the very first — prototype designed to run Windows that never came to be. A few Windows-based Surface Duo prototypes were recently listed for sale on Goofish, a Chinese marketplace for second-hand products, and spotted by Windows Central.

The model listed on the platform has a few noticeable differences from the first commercial version of Surface Duo. It has a monochrome camera to capture 3D footage for Holo Lens devices, a metallic frame, and a mechanism to charge the stylus wirelessly. The Surface Duo 1 lacked all of these features (including the camera!), and the likely reason was to reduce the weight of the hardware.

However, there are various observable similarities, such as the 360-degree hinge that allows rotating screens both inwards and out, a glaring Windows logo on one of the panels, a squarish design, and thick bezels above and below the two screens.

One of the many prototypes listed on GooFish also features a narrower shell as compared to the actual Surface Duo, suggesting it was one of the many iterations Microsoft experimented with before finalizing one.

The Surface Duo, especially one with a truly folding display, could have carved a new category of products that would sit between phones and PCs. But Microsoft decided to axe the project entirely in 2023, a decision that CEO Satya Nadella later lamented in an interview later that year.

Currently, the prototype is listed for a staggering price of ¥98,999 (roughly $13,730). At this price, it feels like a collector’s edition and less like a product anyone would (willingly) buy — if they can get themselves to trust a less popular peer-to-peer selling platform.