Microsoft showed off its upcoming dual display smartphone, the Surface Duo, at its Surface event last year. The device is expected to be formally announced this fall, and the hype around it is pretty high. So obviously, when the Redmond giant launched the official Surface Duo SDK and emulator for developers yesterday, I downloaded it as well and played around with it a bit. Here’s a quick look at the Microsoft Surface Duo’s software.

Note: The emulator is pretty buggy, but it does give us a good early look at the software experience of the Surface Duo, and how the company is planning on utilising the dual-displays on the phone.

New Wallpapers

The first thing I checked out were the new wallpapers that Microsoft has designed for the dual-screen display on the Surface Duo. Other than the usual “Microsoft Launcher” wallpapers that you’d find when you install Microsoft Launcher on any Android phone, there are two new wallpapers under a “Surface images” collection.

I tried both of these wallpapers on the emulator, and they do look pretty great spread out over both the displays. Here are some screenshots of the Surface Duo’s new wallpapers.

Obviously, the company might add more wallpapers when the device actually ships, and these might not even be in the final release, but they sure look great.

Gesture Navigation

Out of the box, the Surface Duo will come with Android 10 (at least as of this SDK), and it will bring the stock Android 10 gestures in tow. So you can swipe up on the gesture-pill to go home, swipe-up and hold to open the recent apps menu, and swipe from the left or right edge of the screen to go back.

However, if you’re like me and you don’t really find the gestures in Android 10 to be to your liking, you can switch back to using the old 3-button navigation system. The setting wasn’t really visible in the Settings page, but it can be found by searching for “navigation” in the Settings search bar.

Also in the gesture settings is an option to