What is the cell phone that Bill Gates uses (and why he didn’t buy it)

Bill Gates has a very particular relationship with cell phones. The company he founded, Microsoft, was for years a competitor to Apple with its operating system. windows phone; and in fact both iPods and iPhones were banned from the Gates home for their children, even though In the United States, more than 80% of teenagers use an Apple phone..

After the end of windows phone in 2017 he adopted the Android platform, although he always has an iPhone at home to try things out. He finds Android more flexible, he says, and has better integration with the tools of the company he founded in 1975 and from which he retired in 2008. But still, the universe of Android phones is huge. What phone do you use?

Currently, Bill Gates has a brand new Galaxy Z Fold4that Samsung introduced last August. The folding phone from the South Korean company also has a detail: it was given to them as a gift. That’s right: the man who was for years the richest in the world, and who today he has the seventh largest fortune, with 103,000 million dollarsyou didn’t spend the $1,585 needed to buy a Galaxy Z Fold4 in the United States.

According to Gates in a reddit chat (an AMA, or As Me Anything, an open talk with the audience) he had been using a Z Fold3, but now he has a Z Fold4 that he gave him as a gift Jay Y. Lee, current CEO of Samsung after the death of his father.

“I have a Samsung Fold4 that was given to me by JY Lee, the director of Samsung, when I saw it in South Korea to update my Fold 3. Of course, I use Outlook and a bunch of Microsoft software on it. The screen size means that I don’t use a tablet, just my cell phone and my laptop-a Windows computer, ”Gates says in the talk, in which he also clarifies that he has a Windows Surface Studio as a desktop PC.

Given this statement, there were many who noticed that Microsoft has a smartphone on the market that could offer similar features: a Surface Duo 2a smartphone with a book-like format, which unites two 5.8-inch displays with a hinge, and offers a combined surface area of ​​8.3 inches. By comparison, the Fold4 has a 7.6-inch folding internal display.

Of course, the size of the screen does not define these teams: the overall Duo 2 hardware is older (it’s a 2021 device)and it was a more experimental team, unlike the Fold4, an integral part of Samsung’s successful strategy to dominate the foldable smartphone market; and indeed the latest rumors They suggest that Microsoft would have canceled the development of the Surface Duo 3 in favor of a new model that uses a folding screen, that is, that offers a continuous surface, but that has the advantage of folding like a book. Maybe then Bill Gates will return to his first love and switch to a Microsoft cell phone.

THE NATION