iPhone Duo Review: First Generation Fun!（原声文稿）

First generation devices are always the most fun to review and for the past like month Everyone I talked to has been asking me what do you think of the iPhone duo like should I get a foldable iPhone? Is that for me? Who is it even really for? You've been testing it for the past week, right?

Yeah, so most new pieces of tech are Fundamentally like a solid idea at their core and then they can be a little bit rough around the edges But that'll get better over time The iPhone Duo specifically as the first folding iPhone is very polished around the edges, but kind of rough in the middle, if that makes sense. Let me explain.

So Apple does this annoying thing when they come out with new products where they kind of ignore the rest of the world and pretend the competition just doesn't exist.

So it can be kind of brutal listening to them go up on stage and pretend that they're inventing something and explaining something we've never seen before, but the honest truth is for a lot of people they really actually haven't yet seen this before.

So we know like you and I know that this first folding iPhone is years behind like eight generations behind the first folding phones we saw back in like 2019.

But for a whole mass of people this is the first one they've ever really even considered buying.

So it kind of forces them to think very deliberately about that question and forming a cohesive, understandable reason why they should spend $2 ,000 on this.

So like this animation everyone's been talking about since the launch between the closed and opened Duos displays. It's not just good because it's smooth.

I mean it is smooth but it's good because it's literally teaching first -time foldable users what is happening.

My theory and a lot of people have also shared this is I think it was inspired by this lenticular sheet which obviously is pretty cool.

I could be wrong, but it's nearly the exact same visual effect.

When the sheet is on top of something, you start to lift it up and it slowly diffuses what's underneath it, right?

So now enter iPhone Duo, when you start opening it up, it slowly diffuses what's underneath it.

And it's super responsive to the hinge angle as you open or close more for realism.

makes sense, but not only that, then you get to the open half and all of this reflection and this diffusion implies that there is more underneath that.

So it's all designed to help people intuitively understand that they're opening to reveal an extended display.

There's a bunch of other super clever, really well considered polished stuff like that all around this phone that I'll get to in a second.

But also then the hardware, it kind of, it does feel very first gen.

So this is very pretty and the side rails are titanium very shiny very premium feeling also very fingerprinty but then yeah you open it up and it feels solid because the hinge weight is actually variable so right at the point of opening when you're prying the magnets apart it's really sturdy then it smoothly opens to like halfway then it slows down again so it can stop at various half open states for certain apps which I'll also get to in a a second, and then the last bit snaps open. That's nice. So I mean, you can splash it, you can toss it in your bag.

I'm really just treating it like a regular phone at this point, minus I'm never taken into the beach. I think it's clear that these things don't like sand.

My prediction, by the way, is that Zach bends it slightly but doesn't break it.

It's my prediction. But I'm saying a lot of nice things.

Why do I also say that this feels very first gen, right? All right, well, thick and heavy, right? So look at this, this is a Samsung Z Fold 8.

Same idea obviously, passport -shaped foldable, but it's now Samsung's eighth year doing this and say what you want about Samsung, but they've clearly iterated quite a bit on this stuff.

So this phone is significantly thinner and like 20 -something percent lighter and that stuff makes a big difference in daily use.

Also the size being flatter, I think makes it much easier to pry open and then the slick rounded titanium sides.

The duo feels significant and solid and that's what you want when you're spending $2 ,000 plus obviously, but I'm telling you after you use this thing for like a week or two, you would be happy if it was 20 % lighter.

And I just keep replaying in my head that Time Magazine interview quote where John Ternus recently called a bunch of the other foldables cheap and crappy.

And maybe this is the hot take, but making everything metal and glass and heavy doesn't necessarily make it better to use.

Like it feels good in a hand, but it's like that sometimes works against them. It's just kind of like the permanent Apple design default.

And that's great for like a MacBook Pro or an old Mac tower when you want it to feel metal and substantial, great. But it sometimes backfires like Vision Pro.

Vision Pro is all metal, super heavy in a world of all plastic VR headsets. So does a Vision Pro feel premium and significant to hold?

Yes, does it kinda, at first glance, make the other plastic ones feel cheap and crappy? Kinda, yeah.

But then when you're wearing it on your face for a while, do you also kinda wish it was lighter? Also, yeah.

And same with over your headphones, like most are plastic for a reason.

It's lightweight, you're wearing it on your literal head for a while.

AirPods Max comes along, very premium, feels solid, it's metal, very heavy, maybe a little bit too heavy.

Now you're not wearing an iPhone duo on your face, obviously it's not as dramatic, but the point still stands.

This reminds me a lot of the first generation Pixel Fold.

Just a little thicker and heavier than you're hoping it was, but clearly the right idea.

Other things I've noticed that are just kind of nitpicky but totally real, this is a very right -handed phone.

So your thumb naturally rests right on the fingerprint reader slash power button when you hold it this way, but then they kept camera control all the way down near the bottom right corner.

It's this little cut out by the way and it's a little out of the way, but maybe you're also rotating it into taking a photo or a video so it's not bad, but then that also means there's not quite enough room for the volume buttons on that side. So they put them at the top of the phone, again just slightly out of the way.

And then in iOS, so this launches with 27 .1 out the box, you pull down from the right corner for control center still, you pull down from the middle anywhere, and that's Siri, which means all the way to the the left, that top left corner, is where you pull down to get notifications.

And even with big hands, that's just a little bit of extra hand gymnastics.

And while we're at it, the case situation is also kind of interesting too.

So Apple made two first party cases with the iPhone Duo. This is the Folio case.

It's $130 and magnetizes to the back and then kind of slides to expand to cover the front.

And this nano texture finish is so good.

Obviously it does a great job of hiding the already mostly imperceptible crease, but it also it just feels nice to slide your finger across it.

I did just for fun put it under a microscope to try to see if I could see the micro lenses that make up the nanotexture but they are absolutely tiny.

That over there already is trash.

They did an incredible job with it. I love it.

This is a 7 .6 inch OLED. It's a 120 Hertz display. It matches the 3000 nits of the outside display.

It looks a little better on like a FaceTime call with video than just straight up taking pictures with it but yeah Apple clearly has done the math like they've assumed people won't use this camera very much and they've accepted the trade -off of image quality versus having this big dramatic uninterrupted inter -display.

We'll see if they also bail on that in future generations like Samsung did or if they stick with it.

Now, other things that are good for a first generation phone, the hinge like I talked about with the variable weight, excellent, battery life, this is another thing.

So we finally actually got the quantity, the size of the battery.

It's about a 4 ,900 milliamp hour combined battery, split between the two sides, and it's really good.

Like if you use this phone, let's say the normal ratio is like 75 % closed, 25 % big screen open, this is gonna be an all day phone and then some.

That 2nm A20 Pro chip is doing a lot of heavy lifting and performs great but it's also super efficient.

It feels right on par with the 17 Pro I came from and with a ton of high brightness use I'm regularly ending the day with like 30 plus percent left.

Now if you do decide to do way more big screen use of course it'll be a bit more battery because it's the bigger display but honestly not much it's a very efficient phone and then the camera is on the back right on par with the rest of the foldables out there.

So you've got dual cameras back here, one standard 48 megapixel and one ultra wide.

I was trying to find out exactly which 48 megapixel sensor they were able to fit in this duo since it specifically needs to be something thinner.

And you'd think naturally they'd take from something like the iPhone Air because it's so thin but the literature actually seems to point more towards using the same camera as the iPhone 17E which is not like some insult where it's like incapable of taking great photos.

It is capable of taking really good photos but it does mean that as lighting conditions deteriorate this smaller sensor it does have to crank up the ISO earlier and get noisier earlier than those bigger pro cameras.

What I have taken a lot of photos and videos over the course of the past week and a half and almost none of them have surprised me like it's a solid camera it's an okay camera most of the time the ultra -wide is like baseline useful to have but it's not going to take incredible corner -to -corner sharp photos and then not having a zoom does mean that shots past about 4x are just dramatically worse than the pro phone which has an actual zoom.

Side by side with the 17e and an 18 pro in weaker lighting it's definitely closer to the 17e in terms of sharpness and noise but guess what I also shot the entire Tesla Roadster reaction video on the iPhone duo believe it or not and there were almost no comments about it.

Now, that doesn't mean nobody noticed, and certainly I noticed as I was editing what very much looks like iPhone footage, but the Duo, despite having a Pro chip, doesn't have any of the Pro camera features.

There's no ProRes, there's no Log, it's just good old fashioned 4K30, and it generally looks fine. It's outdoors. Of course the footage is usable.

This is not the iPhone you would choose if you are the iPhone filmmaker who wants It's the absolute best possible pro tools and image quality, which is a little hard to swallow at first because this is the most expensive, therefore most premium iPhone.

But yeah, it's not targeted at that group of people.

It is much more like the productivity entertainment iPhone that happens to have good enough cameras.

And it's good enough cameras that are on par with other foldables that are a tier below the slab style flagship.

As you to take a picture of them, they don't have to ask five or six times.

They can just give you the instructions to get it perfect the first time. Spouse mode.

And then there's Kid Q, which plays colorful, snoopy themed, and it touches, wow. Self portrait mode. They did it, nice.

Bottom line is the hardware is fun.

It is really fun. What's not fun though, right now, is the apps.

So the app situation on the iPhone Duo is its biggest downside right now.

Like right now, as I've released this video at launch.

See, the idea of the iPhone Duo, while it's closed, is it's basically a normal iPhone on the left hand side, but anything that would typically be at the very top or the bottom is moved over to the right, where it's reachable with your right thumb.

So on the home screen, for example, there's a normal grid of apps on the left, but the dock from the bottom moves over to the right, and the time and the battery and cell signal, all that stuff, is also over to the right in this clever little glyph. Make sense?

You open one of Apple's own apps and that theme continues.

the main content is on the left and then the buttons that used to be on the bottom or the top are over to the right where they're reachable. So this is a brilliant concept. It's cool.

It's sort of the blueprint for an optimized app.

The problem is most apps, at least most of the ones I use right now, are not optimized yet, which means they look like this.

Just a regular app with the buttons still at the top and the bottom and then a black bar down the right hand side where the buttons are supposed to be.

So Spotify looks like this, Google Maps, Waze, Discord, and Twitter are all like this, Google Calendar is like this, like tons and tons of apps, big apps, most of them are currently like this.

And then when you open up the phone, they're mostly still just small, unoptimized iPhone apps in the middle of this huge screen, which is hilarious.

Even if you turn it vertical, still, very small, very reminiscent of the old iPad days where you could just hit the 2x button and it just made it bigger.

So some apps are slightly more responsive like they'll that look pretty terrible on the duo right now.

I think in about six months once developers get a bunch of these and start developing the duo specific versions of their apps because this isn't just an iPad app it's a duo app that they have to make, then things will start feeling way better.

And this is one of Apple's biggest strengths to be fair like just dragging developers along for stuff like this.

So I think most of the big ones will come along for the ride eventually, but not all of them will. Not all of them are gonna make it.

Like I know now that I will have to officially abandon Arc Mobile as my browser of choice because they're done developing that for mobile.

Like the gym app that I use every day that that's probably not gonna get updated so stuff like that. But I really can't wait.

Like I'm constantly checking the software updates I have available in the App Store because I can't wait for the updated duo versions of these apps.

Shout out to Instagram just got the update today as I'm filming this and also Carrot Weather, my weather app of choice, they did it.

They've got all their stuff together.

Close screen, buttons are on the right hand side now and then open it up and they've got the two columns.

Buttons are still reachable on the right. Hopefully more get on this page soon.

And I'll also mention this has been kind of a buggy phone to test.

I've had a couple of things like freeze up on me, not like full catastrophic restart the whole phone freezes but a couple weird bugs, especially in that continuity animation.

you know, obviously, okay, it's designed to be pretty quick. Like you just open it, close it, that sort of it.

But if you slow it way down or even stop halfway and then try to interact with the display, it can get kind of confused.

Mainly because there's so many different possible states that it could be in and it's trying to figure it out like the hinge angle and the orientation, like should it be standby mode? Should it be between the apps on the right or the left?

It can be a little weird, but that's also me kind of trying to break it.

My biggest software gripe with this whole phone though is actually not a bug. It's an intentional feature.

So you know how I said earlier, this is the first foldable phone that a lot of people have seen.

And so there's a lot of thoughtful consideration and polish with the software to accommodate for that. Well, this phone also doesn't have face ID.

We knew this, not enough Z -access space, not thick enough, so fine.

They've done what all the other foldables have done which is add a fingerprint reader on the power button. Great.

but they've programmed in a massive, not massive, but a delay on that fingerprint reader.

Now if you've been using phones with fingerprint readers for a while, you've already known, like you've developed this behavior where if you just wanna check the lock screen real quick, then using your registered finger is actually too fast, like you just unlocks right away and skips the lock screen.

So to check your lock screen notifications, you instead just tap with a different finger so it doesn't unlock and then you can read whatever.

And then when you do wanna unlock, then use the correct finger again and it opens up.

With iPhone Duo, Apple built in a delay with every single unlock.

So you can tap with your registered finger.

It pauses on the lock screen for a beat and then if you keep holding, then it unlocks.

It's technically smart, like it's giving people a chance to check to see their notifications real quick before it goes and unlocks it and if they wanna deliberately hold it longer, it'll unlock but I just as someone who's used to the instant unlocks from face ID I was like I need to find a way to turn this off and I did not find that.

Like it just makes the fingerprint reader feel slow when it's not slow.

Like this new behavior I taught myself with the duo is you can speed it up by waking it then swiping up then touching a fingerprint reader and it unlocks basically instantly. It's really fast.

I just wish I didn't have to do all of that every single time.

I really think face ID is going to be the number one thing people miss coming from other iPhones.

Not the zoom cameras, not the thinner and lighter form factors, I think it's Face ID.

So most new products, like I've said, have this good idea somewhere at the core, and then they can be a little bit rough around the edges and that will get patched up and better over time.

iPhone Duo, as I've mentioned, is very polished around the edges, all these sleek animations and all this stuff, but it is a little bit rougher at the core, like just being a little thicker and heavier and having a bunch of apps not look good.

But there are going to be people who this phone is really good for because this phone is really good at a few things and I've seen those flashes of greatness with it, with my week and a half of using it. The obvious one is two apps side by side. Why would you do that? Well, there's actually tons of good reasons to it.

You just have to remember that you can do it and then you'll just start doing it more.

Like YouTube open on one side and note taking open on the other side.

Very useful or maybe just replace YouTube with something else, like a video call or anything really.

Also copying and pasting, like an email confirmation code from one side into a login portal on the other side, also extremely clutch and just replace whatever copying and pasting you wanna be doing.

If you have two apps open side by side and then tap on the divider in the middle, it locks them together in a pair and visually looks like a book.

And so sort of intuitively makes sense anytime you open one, they both open up together. And then you can unpair it the same way.

And then the back and forth with all the different windows is super intuitive. You can go home on one side, not the other.

Then you can swipe between recent apps on one side but not the other. It's all super clean.

You can't do a third window and you can't do anything other than two apps side by side, half screen, but that's of course still better than a regular iPhone.

I also have to try just for the memes to scroll Instagram Reels and TikTok at the same time.

and technically you can do it but it actually does kind of bug out a little sometimes because it wants to only play the audio from one and then it kind of gets weird I'm gonna turn the volume on I might get crazy but this is the tiktok audio gonna switches back you see I would switch back to the Instagram and then back to tiktok so you you can't hear both at once and maybe Maybe that's a good thing, but this could be you, but don't do that.

But the other thing it's actually really good at, better than a lot of other foldables, is the halfway open state, because this hinge is so sturdy in the middle that it's probably the best foldable at just being partially open, and they've planned around that.

So if you're typing, but then like sort of partially close it, the keyboard splits in half to avoid you having to touch the middle.

There's also apps that let you type or control on one half of the screen while you have content playing on the other half, we've seen that before.

But then this is the first iPhone that automatically enters standby mode, even when it's not connected to power, when you just put it up in like a tent formation.

So when it's vertical, it'll just show two different customizable screensavers.

And when it's in horizontal, it'll show one big screensaver like your clock or weather or calendar or whatever you want. It's really nice.

And the phone has more than enough battery to sort of just sit on a desk all day, showing notifications and not have any issues.

And there is of course, the sort of awesome underglow alarm clock.

And then I just have to say, it does the continuity thing incredibly well.

Like the speed that it goes from open to closed and closed to open and picks up exactly where you left off.

Like you could be in the middle of writing an email with an attachment, this whole big thing.

And you realize, you know, I want to do a little more multitasking to get this done.

You just open the phone and keep it going. on just picks up right where you left off.

You could be in the middle of reading something, open the phone mid scroll and it finishes that scroll and keeps going, it's so good.

And then the matte inner display, I can't say enough nice things about it. It is the hardware highlight of the Duo.

It's nice to read things on, it's nice to watch videos on, it really blocks reflections super well and it's nice to hold it vertically like an iPad mini.

Matter of fact, this is the orientation that the volume buttons on the side make more sense.

And I find myself holding it like this, reading stuff more than any other foldable I've used.

But most of all, the polish I keep talking about at the edges, it's just, it helps people to understand what is happening on the phone.

So the opening closing animation, like I talked about the two apps next to each other, animation that I also talked about, also the new dynamic island animation, since it's over here on the side now. Did you catch that?

Also the inner display selfie camera, when you close the camera app, just shrinks up the pixels to hide the camera. That is so clean.

The condensed battery time and signal strength indicator over in the corner has become very easy to read and I've gotten used to it. The dots at the bottom are your cell signal strength. It's all very well put together.

And it's not a coincidence that the camera viewfinder fills up the whole display perfectly with no black bars because the camera sensor is the same aspect ratio as the outer screen, which is also the same aspect ratio as the inner screen rotated 90 degrees.

So it always fills up your display. Such a nice touch.

I told you there's a lot with these first generation devices.

So okay, I know that a lot of people when they see that there are chapters in this video and there's a conclusion chapter, they're gonna skip right to this part of the video in which case, hi, shame on you for skipping, watch the rest of the video. There's so much other good stuff in there. But okay, fine, I get it.

Your finger is hovering over the order button and you just need someone to tell you if it's good or not, just someone please tell us if we should buy this thing or not.

Okay, first of all, I do think that by the time you actually get your Duo, if you're just now gonna order, in a couple of weeks and months, there should be way more apps optimized for the Duo, so that's nice. But yeah, the idea is really simple and concept, right?

It's $2 ,000 to get an iPad mini that can fit in your pocket.

120 Hertz iPad mini OLED fits in your pocket. have you ever wanted that? They made it. They did it. Great.

This is the first generation. It's made for you. But also, yeah, it is polished, but rough. Am I making any sense?

There's going to be a lot of attention on this phone because it's a new iPhone.

And people with other iPhones are always curious if they should be getting the newest iPhone.

And for most of those people, the answer is probably actually no.

Like if you're just a regular person who doesn't do much more than texting on social media on their phone, some occasional web browsing here and there. Like, yeah, probably no.

If you are the iPhone filmmaker who wants the absolute best cameras to go shoot their next thing, no.

If you're the type of person who breaks your phone every like nine months, because you drop it all the time, yep, probably no.

But if the $2 ,000, or the difference between 35 and 55 bucks a month, doesn't mean much to you and you just kind of like the idea and want to jump in I think after the learning curve and and getting used to not having face ID this is a really fun phone to use and it's really just because that polish that polish around the edges goes a long way towards the fun factor so the awesome animations the incredible hinge the wonderful inside display like all of that is just really nice and it hides a little bit of the rough core like it will feel a little heavy sometimes and not all your favorite apps will be updated right out the box, but it is fun.

I'm gonna have to cross my fingers that a second generation actually listens to some of that core feedback because that could be an amazing phone.