Apple’s Foldable iPhone Duo Is the Most Exciting Phone in Years. And It Lives Up to the Hype.
I thought the iPhone Duo would ruin my life.
Dramatic? Obviously. But I’m actively trying to use my phone less, and I worried that the Duo, a foldable phone with a smaller exterior screen that opens to become a tablet, was tailor-made to revive my addiction just as my screen time had begun to inch down.
In my hands-on time with the device at Apple headquarters in September, the Duo felt genuinely marvelous to use. That feeling is rare — tech products are no longer that exciting.
“I’m going to want to use this thing all the time,” I told my friends and colleagues.
But in my week of testing the Duo before it went on sale, I found the opposite to be true. Though it has a gorgeous interior display with an eye-pleasing matte finish, I actually preferred using the device in what I call Little Phone mode. And I found myself using it less than I expected.
Here’s what I discovered:
Having two screens in one device is really useful. Apple’s first foldable iPhone is a passport-sized phone that unfolds into a small tablet. The matte interior display is excellent for watching movies, multitasking, or doing laptop tasks. The smaller outer screen lets you quickly interact with notifications without getting sucked into social media.
The software is elegant. Transitioning between the outer screen and the inner display is seamless.
But the app experience isn’t always great. The apps you use the most might not be optimized for the Duo’s wider screens yet. I expect that to change quickly; over my weeklong testing period, more apps were optimized almost every day.
It’s great for anything you use a tablet for. Following recipes, making video calls, streaming TV, planning trips — if you get a Duo, you don’t need an iPad.
It’s expensive. $2,000 is a lot for a phone. But it’s really nice.
What I love about the iPhone Duo
The concept of the iPhone Duo, and most other foldable phones, is simple: Little Phone unfolds into Small Tablet. While I initially worried that I would become hopelessly immersed in Small Tablet mode, I wound up using the Duo mostly as a Little Phone.
The Duo’s software looks so damn good. I’ve used many iterations of foldable phones over the years, from Samsung, Motorola, Google, and even Chinese companies that don’t sell their foldables in the US. Though foldable phones have improved in the past two years, free of the durability issues that once plagued them, Apple has created an unmatched experience in the Duo. Take the seamless transition that occurs on screen when you unfold the phone: The handoff is accompanied by a blurring effect as you open the larger screen like a book. No other foldable phone’s software is this elegant.
The small cover screen is useful for triaging notifications. The iPhone Duo has a glossy 5.4-inch outer display with close to the same amount of real estate as the iPhone 18 Pro’s display, just in a squatter shape. And you can use this outer screen for basically everything — reading and responding to texts, taking photos and posting them to Instagram, browsing the web, and so on. The only thing you can’t do on the cover display is use what Apple calls Split View, which is using two apps side by side.
This Little Phone mode was my primary way of interacting with the Duo. The shorter, wider design fits easily into my pants pockets (taller iPhones barely fit into my jeans and poke me in the stomach when I sit down). On the cover screen, the app dock is on the right side instead of pinned to the bottom, which makes it easier to use with one hand if you’re right-handed.
Note that you can’t move the dock to the left, or even to the bottom, which is annoying for left-handed people, though an accessibility software update later this year will let you shift the interface to the right or left for easier reachability.
The big screen’s matte finish is game-changing. The Duo’s 7.6-inch inner display has the paperlike texture of an E Ink screen, similar to what you’d find on a Kindle. All other foldable phones open to reveal a shiny screen, and while notable creasing in foldables is less of an issue than it once was, it’s more pronounced on a glossier surface. The Duo’s crease is unnoticeable unless you’re really looking for it.
The matte finish is also useful for watching videos without glare. Whether I’m watching episodes of East of Eden on Netflix or out in my backyard streaming security-cam footage of my rescue pup remaining calm when left alone inside a long while, viewing content on the Duo is pleasant on the eyes.
It offers an iPad experience in an iPhone package. If you buy an iPhone Duo, you don’t need an iPad. The Duo offers an iPad-like multitasking experience through a feature called Split View, which lets you use two apps simultaneously side by side.
I wish that the app windows were resizable or that I could use them stacked vertically when the Duo is in portrait orientation, but it was novel to be able to do trip research in Safari with Maps open right next to it. (I did have some issues with Split View when I first set up the Duo, but erasing the phone and setting it up again — the software equivalent of unplugging something and plugging it back in — immediately fixed the problem.) You can pair apps together so that launching one launches both in Split View, which I used to pin Slack and Gmail together for quickly catching up on work conversations.
You can use the Duo for any iPad task. I set it up in the kitchen to follow NYT Cooking recipes, watched TV in bed, FaceTimed, and shopped online, and because the Duo is still an iPhone, I wasn’t frustrated when some work felt more appropriate to do on a computer. In contrast, the limitations of iPad software can be acutely frustrating because the iPad is often positioned as a laptop replacement. (Editing in Google Docs, for instance, is still a laptop task for me.)
And the fact that the Duo is a Little Phone and a Small Tablet in one makes it a better flight companion. I hate packing my iPad for trips because it takes up space in my personal item that could be better used for snacks or my oversize neck pillow. Throw in a Kindle because the iPad’s screen is too shiny for reading books, and it becomes an entire situation. The Duo is all of those things in one. (The Kindle app is not yet optimized, though, so reading Kindle books on the Duo is currently a nightmare. I hope this is updated ASAP.)
The Duo has some fun photography features. With a front-facing camera on the cover display, an under-display front-facing camera on the large interior display, and two rear-facing cameras in a module on the back of the phone, you have plenty of options for capturing yourself or others.
The camera quality is fine (the iPhone 18 Pro’s is better), but the Duo has some fun photography features that are actually useful. The first, Duo Preview, activates when you unfold the phone to take a photo: The subject can see a live preview of what they look like on the cover display before you snap the image. For those of us with unruly bangs, this is a godsend.
And the ability to use the Duo tented makes it easier to prop up the phone on a surface for making hands-free FaceTime calls or taking higher-quality selfies with the rear cameras.
Touch ID makes a comeback, and it’s useful. Apple sacrificed Face ID in favor of Touch ID on the Duo, with a fingerprint reader built into the right side of the device above the Camera Control button. It takes some getting used to after years of using phones with facial recognition, but I found that Touch ID actually works more reliably than Face ID. It also makes the device more flexible, because the button never moves and is available for use whether the phone is open or closed. And Wirecutter security expert Max Eddy told me that fingerprint recognition is generally safer to use than facial recognition.
The only issue I encountered was remembering where exactly Touch ID was when I rotated the Duo to portrait mode, but Apple’s software points out the button’s location on screen when you need to use it.
The battery life is excellent. The Duo will easily last you at least 36 hours on a charge, even with heavy use. My biggest issue with Apple’s last attempts at a small phone, the iPhone 12 and 13 mini, was the abysmal battery life. The Duo is obviously chunkier than the 13 mini, but it’s similarly easy to use one-handed, and you won’t experience battery anxiety.
It doesn’t feel fragile. The durability of foldables has improved in recent generations, and the titanium Duo feels just as sturdy as rival phones from Google and Samsung. With an IP68 rating, the Duo is able to withstand water and dust, and with Apple’s Ceramic Shield 2 coating on the front glass, it should also be more scratch-resistant. I didn’t attempt to drop or damage the Duo, but I did use it without a case for most of the week, and the phone shows no signs of wear.
The downsides
The iPhone Duo isn’t without its flaws.
It’s expensive. Let’s just get this out of the way: There’s no reason to spend $2,000 on a phone. You can find excellent smartphones from a variety of companies that cost less than half that. You can even get a decent Android phone for $300 these days. But foldable technology is pricey — Apple’s rivals charge just as much for their bending phones. You’ll have to decide if you’d get enough use out of a foldable to make it worth that money.
Some apps aren’t yet optimized for the Duo’s aspect ratio. Though a good amount of apps take advantage of the Duo’s wider front display and its extra interior screen real estate, you’ll likely install some of your most-used apps and find that they look strange. An app that hasn’t been optimized will have a black bar down the right side, where the controls should be, on the outer screen, and it will look like a small, phone-shaped window in the expansive black sea that is the Duo’s inner screen.
Apple has attempted to work around this issue with a toggle that allows you to expand the window to fill more of the interior screen, and it’s a decent solution. I was able to stream a fitness class in an app that hadn’t yet been updated, without losing any features.
But trying to watch a show on HBO Max, which also isn’t optimized yet, was a bust — expanding the window made the show look strange. I expect this to be a temporary problem; the Duo just launched, and app developers need time to update. But if you rely heavily on apps that haven’t been updated yet, you might find yourself frustrated by how they look on the Duo.
It lacks a telephoto lens. A phone that costs this much should have the best cameras, but Apple reserved its triple-lens array for the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. The Duo has just two rear camera lenses, a standard and an ultrawide.
It’s capable of 2x “optical-quality” zoom but lacks a true telephoto lens, so if you attempt to take a close-up of a subject from far away, you’ll be disappointed in the details (or lack thereof). I took a photo of my neighbor’s unhinged Halloween decorations to send to my best friend, and the baby dolls crawling up the stucco wall looked fuzzy at 4.5x digital zoom. My iPhone 15 Pro’s 5x optical zoom captured them clearly.
Apple Pencil support isn’t available at launch. The iPhone Duo will be Apple’s first iPhone to support the use of a stylus (specifically the Apple Pencil USB-C), but that feature is coming later this year.
It doesn’t have Face ID. I quickly readjusted to Touch ID, and while I think a fingerprint sensor makes sense for a device like this, a phone this expensive should support multiple forms of authentication.
The bottom line
You don’t need me to tell you that you don’t need to spend $2,000 on a phone. Apple’s iPhone 17 is perfectly good and costs $1,100 less. You could buy both a smaller phone and a tablet, such as the iPad mini, for less than what the iPhone Duo costs.
The best iPhone for most people
The iPhone 17 comes with features once reserved for Apple’s Pro models, including a bigger and brighter display with a 120 Hz refresh rate, a higher-resolution front-facing camera that takes better selfies, and long-lasting battery life.
But if you’re an early adopter who doesn’t mind some of the trade-offs that come with buying a first-gen device, namely the fact that the apps you use the most might not look great for the time being, the iPhone Duo is extremely satisfying to use — and less addictive than I had feared.
I plan to continue testing the Duo as more apps are optimized and Apple Pencil support is added in coming weeks. And though I’m sending this unit back after I update this review, I’m eyeing my iPhone and the iPad Air I never use and mentally tallying trade-in values to justify the upgrade. After life with Little Phone, it’s tough to go back.
No comments:
Post a Comment