This Is My Last

The iPhone Duo Reviews Are Out

The iPhone Duo reviews are out.

Nilay Patel and Allison Johnson, the Verge, summed up their reviews as such:

It is expensive, it’s full of compromises, and it can be incredibly frustrating to use. [...] But all of the risk and weirdness of the Duo is also fun, in the way the best early adopter devices are fun. It’s incomplete as a product, but complete enough as an idea that you can see where things are going.

The reviewers also noted that Apple, instead of sticking an iPad inside the folding phone, "decided to throw everything out and start over":

That means getting rid of a lot of weird iPad baggage, but it also means that solved problems on the iPad are back on the Duo. It’s big stuff and little stuff: For whatever reason, the Duo doesn’t support pinching the keyboard to make it smaller and friendlier to use one-handed — a feature iPads have had for ages. It also means there are new ways to think about multitasking, and sometimes you’ll be unsure what will happen when you swipe around the screen because apps interact with iOS and each other in very different ways.

Over to Joanna Stern, on YouTube, after folding and unfolding the iPhone Duo 32,640 times:

In everyday use, I really couldn't feel a difference. […] It felt pretty much the same as day one, which is pretty darn impressive.

And Mark Spoonauer, Tom's Guide, reminded everyone on the compromises:

I like the iPhone Duo’s nano texture display in that it greatly reduces glare outdoors and minimizes the crease better than any foldable I’ve tested. But you give up perfect blacks with this matte panel and more saturated colors versus the iPhone 18 Pro Max. You also sacrifice a telephoto lens and Face ID. I can live with those trade-offs, but that doesn’t mean I like them.

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