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Now that I have your attention, fanboys are an absolute plague, and no launch in recent memory exemplifies this more than the iPhone Duo. No, the screen is not unusable, but it's also not the best thing since folding bread either. Like any design decision in a modern device, what it is a trade-off, a compromise based on the best guesses of the engineers and designers who built it. And the absolute war that has erupted over this device has unmasked a lot of folks who I used to believe could at least pretend to be objective. So I spent the last couple of weeks living with it, and I put together my thoughts as someone who has been daily driving foldables since the very beginning and as someone who uses Apple products but doesn't
always love them. I also put together my thoughts about our sponsor, which is of course Dbrand. They make some very cool products for the iPhone Duo, which you'll learn more about at the end of this video. The holiday vault is open at lttstore.com. Let's talk deals. Two classic print tees for 50 bucks, sharing option. A commuter for $169.99 with a $30 lttstore gift card included. Nice. Plus, purple and teal Prism Magic Screwdrivers are back. Festive. Functional. Kickoff offers end November 23rd. Shop the vault at lttstore.com. To avoid some of the emotionality of the anti-glare coating conversation, I'm going to try and keep this part
objective. There are two main trade-offs when you're designing a screen coating, contrast and glare. If you go too far in your quest for contrast, you end up with a mirror-like black surface that is going to reflect back the very pores on the bridge of your nose anytime you dare to look into it. However, if you fully succeed in scattering any light that strikes the surface of the screen, you will effectively elevate your black levels to the where it feels like looking at one of those old school LCD displays where black was really more of a darkish medium gray. Apple has gone for a middle ground. Their nano texture finish scatters light, but doesn't reduce the brightness or the sharpness of the image beneath it
and results in a noticeably less visible crease along with just a paper-like viewing experience that looks shockingly like reading on an E-ink display. It's a trick, of course. This is not a front-lit display and reading for hours at a time was not as comfortable for me as my Kindle Color Soft, but if you are an avid reader who doesn't want to carry two devices around, the Duo could hold a special appeal for you. And that's something you're probably going to hear again before I'm done here. The other element that Apple nails with this coating is the touch feel.
I recently did a sponsored video for Samsung looking back at every generation of their foldables and I had forgotten just how bad the early pre-installed screen protectors were. Apple's, meanwhile, feels a little weird until you get used to it, but what it manages to do extremely well is avoid any kind of sticky or greasy feeling even when it isn't perfectly clean and I tip my cap to them. Of course, as I mentioned before, there is a trade-off to contrast here. In spite of our measured brightness getting near Apple's advertised 3,000 nits on both the inner and the outer displays, in anything but total darkness, the black level of the iPhone Duo does fall short of competing devices that
have glossy screens, which means you're not going to get that same OLED pop that you might expect. However, this is where I'm going to inject some opinion and say Apple still nailed this because that screen protector is removable, making it truly a best of all worlds device in that one specific area. It definitely falls short in other areas for me, but we're going to talk about that later. First, some more things it gets right, or at least right enough, starting with the speakers. These are just so much better than my daily driver Fold 7 that the first time I fired up a piece of content on the Duo, I did a double take.
Like, I know Apple's reputation for shockingly big sound in impossibly thin devices has been building for just about the last decade at this point, but I was still taken aback by just how good Sorry, no, how great the iPhone Duo sounds. Like, to be clear, I'm still going to use my AirPods 90% of the time, but even with their decent water resistance, I'd rather not put them in the bathtub. And so the Duo takes the compromise out of being stuck with my phone speakers in a way that I just didn't expect from it. Performance is another highlight. Now, to many folks, it was obvious that anything with A20 Pro silicon in it was going to be an absolute stallion, but there were also some pretty well-founded concerns
about how Apple was going to manage the thermals in such a thin and constrained form factor. Well, it turns out both were kind of right. Due to its smaller vapor chamber and much lower surface area for heat dissipation, the iPhone Duo does fall behind the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, especially in long sustained load like continuous gaming. But even so, it manages to exceed the performance of every Galaxy device that our LTT Labs team tested it against. So Apple lost, but only in the same way that China lost the women's doubles badminton final in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Same goes for battery, actually. If we cherry-pick results, it's easy to spin a narrative about Apple taking a step back for battery
life here, but guys, we are still talking about 24 hours of real-world video streaming on this thing, and that jumps to nearly 34 hours on the cover screen. That is a phenomenal result thanks to Apple's split battery that you can see clearly along with the rest of the guts in these incredible LumaField scans, thanks to the LTT Labs team. I'm going to have their companion article linked down below, along with a link to this great hoodie that uses some of their favorite scans for a fun all-over print. It's on sale right now, by the way. Charge time for the duo was nothing special. Labs did note that the awkward port placement on the front half of the folded slab made it a little less comfortable to use
while plugged in, but from my perspective of battery life like this, I suspect that's not going to happen very often. Personally, I was really happy to see the return of Touch ID. I've always found it more natural to authenticate by using the same button that I press to wake up my device. However, this might surprise some folks out there, I wasn't happy to see the removal of Face ID. See, I'm a big fan of choice, and my perfect phone, the Note 9, would contain both a hands-free and a no-look biometric reader, especially if the fingerprint sensor was positioned so awkwardly while using the inner screen.
May only be 7.6 in inside, but quite often ends up requiring two hands to operate if you catch my drift. Since we're talking about the inner screen, this seems like a great time to talk about the camera system. The inner camera is kind of butt. Soft, butt, full of compromise. But I applaud Apple's genuine courage making this move here because they knew they were going to take flak for the image quality, and still they shipped an under-screen camera that, in my opinion, is perfectly adequate enough for highly compressed FaceTime calls, and more importantly, is significantly less distracting for daily use than the notches and hole punches that I've seen on other folding devices.
Given that this is coming from the company that pioneered display notches, and to this day includes one in their laptops no less, I'm hoping that this is just the first step in a reversal in their willingness to compromise on the experience of using my device for the sake of someone else on the end of a Zoom meeting. As for the rest of the cameras, they're fine, I guess. You get an ultra wide and a standard shooter on the back, each clocked at 48 megapixels. If you were expecting them to suck, you don't know Apple very well. And if you were expecting them to be great, then you weren't paying attention to the iPhone Air. As for the real selfie camera, the hole punch style affair on the cover screen, it's
pretty great. It uses Apple's square sensor that allows portrait or landscape capture, no matter how you're holding [snorts] your phone. And everybody needs to copy this for every sensor on every phone camera. I absolutely love it. I wish I could say that I loved the capture experience of the rear camera in the same way, though. To a man, woman, and child, every single person that I showed this to was like, wait, what? How could a company so focused on creators and creation ship a device that uses so little of its giant display to preview what I'm capturing?
Like, okay, to be clear, I do get it. We don't have square sensors for every lens yet. So if they were to rotate these 90 degrees, then it would be silly town on the front screen instead, which arguably would suck even more since that display is already so much smaller to begin with. But still, I cannot get behind this decision, nor can I get behind a lot of Apple's decisions about how to manage screen space on this device. See, it's at its best when you pull it out, unfold it, and enjoy the magic of a tablet that folds up and fits in your pocket. I've said before, it's the kind of thing that once you go foldable, it's really hard to go back. But
this is the part where things do get a little more negative. So Apple fan boys, feel free to skip to the conclusion where, spoiler, I say it's pretty swell, though it'll be at expensive and uh going through some growing pains right now. The one to root two aspect ratio, in my opinion, is a usability quagmire that breaks both fundamental design conventions for mobile websites and applications and Apple's own laws with respect to device navigation. On the outer screen, for instance, it frequently pits my keyboard against my content as they both vie for the precious little vertical scrolling space I have. And as if that wasn't enough, it makes Apple's go back gesture so awkward to execute one-handedly that
they sheepishly added a back button to the navigation info bar thing over on the right here, bringing the total number of ways to go back on an iPhone up to like what, four? Five now? Depending on the context? When is Apple just going to admit that they were wrong and add a system-wide back button or at the very least allow me to do the back gesture from this side like on Android? Well, if the home screen layout on the main display is anything to go by, I'm going to go with never. Listen, I am no spring chicken, having just completed my 40th trip around the sun, but even my aging eyes find Apple's insistence
that four columns ought to be enough for anybody irritating on the iPhone and absolutely mind-bendingly infuriating on the Duo. Like are you kidding me right now? And that is just one of the ways that Apple's design philosophy takes away from the whole point of a device like this. Like I could do a whole paragraph dunking on third-party apps like Plex, which has letterboxing on full-screen movies, G Suite, which just takes their standard version of the app and then blows them up with comically low density and pillar boxes on vertical content, not to mention Instagram that did whatever this was while I was siding into it. It really does take away from the experience, but it also feels like an overdone cheap
shot when realistically the people who buy these are in it for the long haul. They're going to be using them for three to seven years and all of that stuff will be fixed once these developers update their apps using Apple's new tools. No, instead what I want to look at is what's wrong with Apple's own vision for how apps should work on the Duo. When it works, it works great. Apple Maps is beautiful and immersive, whether you're grabbing a quick peek at the cover screen or exploring a new location you'd like to visit on the inner one. But Apple Photos falls way short of that experience. It looks great on the inner
screen, but on the outer one Apple has made the choice to include their contentless navigation bar while it's folded. For what? So that right-handed users, which are the majority, sorry, have an extra thing to reach over? Like to be clear, now that we have this derpy aspect ratio, I don't actually have a better solution and yeah, it's not that hard to reach over. I'm just saying that there had to be many opportunities for someone at Apple to go, hey, this kind of sucks before they committed to moving forward with this. Even the inner screen suffers from a somewhat muddled vision from Apple. The again derpy aspect ratio tempts developers to use a two-column layout, but if you
really stop and think about it, do two columns really increase the amount of relevant information on my screen at once? Like I can kind of see it for chat applications if you rapidly switch between your various convos, but how often am I navigating my system settings in such a way that I need to be able to refer back to the earlier branches that I could have taken? And then heaven forbid I decide to search for something in here. Gross. By the way, since we're on the subject of the keyboard being in my way, the Duo marks the official moment when Apple needs to stop hamstringing third-party keyboards or once and for all fix their own.
They offer a few different layouts on the Duo, including a one-handed and a split board. Those are good things. But Apple's autocorrect is somehow still, after all these years, comically bad. No other keyboard on my Fold 7, the Samsung board, Gboard, or SwiftKey would let important pass without automatically fixing it for me. And Apple offers only very limited flexibility around resizing and repositioning the keyboard itself. When my screen is this weird, I might want to make choices for myself, like harvesting back a little bit more vertical space on the front by squishing my keys or reducing the size of my chin bar. With that said though, there's nothing about the iPhone Duo
that I think is unsalvageable. It's a little heavy and a little thick compared to the competing Fold 8, but it also carries its own advantages into that fight, and even the pricing can be somewhat overlooked if your alternative was another foldable device, which is going to be priced the same, or a modern iPhone plus an iPad mini, which this could handily replace. It just remains to be seen how Apple is going to optimize their software development tools and their own software to hopefully help themselves and third-party developers take better advantage of the Duo's main asset, its large inner screen. Now it's time for me to take advantage of my main asset, the way I do a segue to our sponsor, Dbrand, who sent over their Duo grip case for us to check out.
Okay, Dbrand, from what I can tell, has gone full suffering from success with their Duo case compared to Apple's first-party options, which just kind of glue onto the back and glue onto the front. Dbrand's case clips onto the back and manages to offer protection not just for the back of the phone and the borders of your screen, but also for the hinge, something that Apple doesn' do at all. And yes, yes, I know. Theoretically, there's no need to protect the hinge because it's IP68 certified or whatever, but it's definitely not hitting the concrete certified when it slips out of your hand. So having some protection on there is something that I would not want to live without, especially for
a device that is so expensive. Apple also has a folio which does cover the hinge, but like is this a case? This is $130? Is that actually correct? Or is that dbrand propaganda? That's got to be Canadian dollars. It's It's $130 US $180 Canadian for this? That's crazy. Anyway, dbrand's case, okay? It sticks onto the front, clips onto the back, covers the hinge and the outer edges of the device and also just like, you know, generally is Chad and you can, you know, throw your phone around, but don't. But you could. As always, in addition to your case, you can pick up a case-friendly screen protector from
dbrand that is super easy to install and even save five bucks by bundling them together. So if you want to pick up a case or screen protector for your new Duo, head on over to shortcircuit.com or check them out nationwide at Best Buy in the USA. There's no way they're going to be able to keep these in stock. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out my review of the iPhone 18 Pro. It was a little late coming out during Duo hype, but I feel like with the labs testing it, still added a fair bit to the conversation. I really enjoyed that phone.
