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Okay, Apple doesn't want you to think of it like this, but the $2,000 iPhone Duo is all about trade-offs. Because if you are considering one of these, then your best Apple alternative is an iPhone 18 Pro. So, the question we have to answer is very simple. Exactly how much you're gaining if you choose a Duo instead, and exactly how much are you losing? Turns out more than I expected. Because the compromises begin the moment you try to unlock the thing. There is no Face ID here. So, on the Duo, every time you unlock, every time you pay, every time you authenticate something, instead of
just glancing at your phone, you got to use Touch ID via the side button. And they have done the obvious stuff well. The button's raised, so you can find it without looking. It works for every banking app that I've tried, just like Face ID. And you can register multiple fingers, which is really important, because you'll probably want your thumb when you're picking it up in your right hand, and then your index finger for the left hand. But the more that I use this, the more I notice how it is worse in a bunch of small ways, and they add up. One, Touch ID is not a tap, it's a hold. So, feels like a tiny bit of extra friction 50 times a day. Two, it can get a little spotty if you've just washed your hands or they're a tiny
bit greasy. Three, it's only really comfortable in landscape. Opened up, the Duo is clearly designed to feel like a magical sheet of glass that you can flawlessly use from all angles, like an iPad Pro. Except the iPad Pro has Face ID, which works in every orientation. The Duo relies on this button that is nowhere near your fingers when you're in portrait. And then four, the most noticeable for me is while Face ID unlocks your phone without any finger action, so you can immediately start with your thumb in the optimal position, Touch ID requires you to first move your thumb out of the way, unlock, and then bring it back in. Now, the way that other foldables address these issues is by letting you use a basic 2D face
unlock, which just uses the selfie camera. Whereas, Apple has clearly decided that it's either proper Face ID or nothing. So, nothing it is. Surely though, this minor inconvenience is worth it if it means you can have the largest display ever on an iPhone. Well, when you start to really analyze how much more the bigger screen actually lets you do versus an 18 Pro Max, I'm not as sold as I thought I'd be. The first thing I tested is watching videos, and if you're going for a proper wide-screen movie, then there is actually zero benefit to the Duo because the width of this phone is almost exactly the same as a Pro Max in landscape. All the extra screen is height, which just becomes black bars.
Thankfully, most content isn't that wide. Like our videos, for example, are 18 by 9, and those do come out a very solid 20% larger on the Duo. And 16 by 9 videos, which is still most of what you'll find on YouTube, does get you almost 50% more viewing area. That is huge. So, generally, there is an upside to the Duo for video. But, it's the app experience where things start to feel a little mixed. I'd say there's three tiers of apps. Tier one is the apps built for this. Basically, a slim selection of Apple's own, like Books, and then a handful of third parties who've designed with the Duo in mind, like Netflix. And these work beautifully. The space isn't just filled, it's actively enhancing the experience. Tier two is
apps that don't feel like they're designed for this, but ones that scale somewhat useably, like YouTube. I don't like this black bar on the side, but the extra width can allow you to see a bit more. I'm pretty indifferent here between using these apps on a Duo versus a Pro. But, for anything else, tier three, I think the bar phone is the better experience. Because any app that is designed for a typical iPhone is going to open like this on a Duo. Fire! You can swipe down in the blank space here to bring it closer, or what makes more sense to me, rotate the phone and enlarge the window like this. But still, this is hardly ideal and doesn't at all feel like a real tablet app. It very
much feels like you're just using an oversized phone. Go figure. But here's the [snorts] one that really stung. So, one of the key reasons that I've been pining for this phone is so that it can finally fix Google Docs, which as you might know is a nightmare on any proportioned iPhone because there's just not enough width. So, okay, let's load it up here. Oh. What on earth is that? So, I can rotate the window, I can enlarge the window, but all it is doing is stretching it. It's not reformatting it to use the space better. And games are the same story, except I would argue with even fewer optimized titles to the
point where it really seems like this is the typical Duo gaming experience, which does feel like a massive shame and makes Samsung Z Fold 8 by comparison a much more desirable experience in many cases. Now, to Apple's credit, some of the apps that weren't scaling properly have actually already been patched during my testing. And when I brought this issue up with them, they said that apps will start filling the screen by themselves as soon as devs start updating them for iOS 27.1. All I can say is I sure hope so because for a $2,000 phone, I expected a significantly better day-one app experience. Thankfully, the web doesn't need app developers to show
up. So, Safari is one of the best things about the Duo. Most pages do take advantage of the extra space. And it's not that you necessarily fit more content on your screen at once, but I think it gives web pages the breathing room that they need. And I really like how Safari on Duo is designed almost like a desktop browser with the way that you can see and flick between your tabs. Okay, here's the thing with the Duo though. It's all well and good talking about the potential upsides of this biggest iPhone display ever, but we have to also factor in that realistically, you're also going to spend half of your time using this much
tinier outer display. And when you do, I think you're getting a distinctly lesser experience versus a normal phone. Because you have the exact same rather unusual aspect ratio of the inside, so apps often still won't just work. Only now without the space of the inner display to make up for it. And then you throw in this control bar, which cuts into your viewing area very noticeably here, and pushes so much of the UI off-center in a way that just doesn't look very polished to me. So, as far as I'm concerned, half the time this is a better display experience than a typical iPhone. But equally, half the time it's worse. So, while I came into this expecting a screen
upgrade, for the most part it just feels like a trade. Now, there are two exceptions to this. Two things that I would say are outright better on the Duo. First is the new standby mode. You can now use it without needing to be plugged in. There's new faces and fonts. Everything's been reformatted to look very pretty. And the highlight has got to be this alarm clock, which uses the inner display to glow while the alarm is playing. To be clear, it's not going to replace one of those sunrise alarms if you actually want to be woken up by the light itself, because this just isn't bright enough. But what it is an extremely aesthetic extra. And then, I guess the primary perk of the Duo
is multitasking. You can't split screen an app on a typical iPhone, you can here. And I would say that all the multitasking capability they have added is great. I think the way that you start split screen by throwing apps to the side is mindless and satisfying. I really like how you click a link on one side, it's going to open that link on the other. And how if there are any elements that are not centrally aligned, then when you go into the half-folded position, they kind of split so that the fold actually acts as a physical divider for the content. That said, you play around enough, you will run into some limitations like how split screen is locked at 50/50 on the duo, unlike an
iPad where you can resize. Like how there's very limited split screen that you can do in portrait. To be fair, this isn't exactly made easy on a Samsung, but at least you can there and there are a few instances where that makes sense. The one thing that you can do is have a video at the top while you browse a page underneath and this is awesome, but it does feel like one unnecessary extra step to get there because you first have to open the video you want to watch in full screen, then you got to close the app to minimize that video into a floating window, then open the other app that you want to scroll before finally dragging that floating window into the top section.
Apple is also starting to add a bunch of half folded features. Like if you're watching a video, you can get controls, but I really feel like if you're going to buy a phone like this, you might as well watch those videos with the whole screen and just prop the phone up using a Torras case like the Q3 spinner, our sponsor. This is everything that I want from a foldable case. It protects both halves, proper hinge coverage, the finish feels fancy, all with the greatest stand that you can get on a mobile phone. I literally use one of these every single day of my life. And it's when you're propping your phone up like this, off angle, under the lights, that you notice the one thing that really deserves to be praised.
Nano texture. When you put this phone side by side with other iPhones or other foldables, me personally, I think the picture quality looks 95% as great head-on. Slightly less contrast, but I think this is more than outweighed by how it hides the crease, it masks fingerprints, and how the moment that any light hits it, the thing is so anti-reflective that it even makes other phones that have anti-reflective coatings look like mirrors. So that is everything with the display. Some genuine wins, but also plenty of caveats. And here's the thing, the display is also where the phone's next problem starts. While it's great to see that the Duo has the exact same A20 Pro chip as Apple's Pro phones, the vapor
chamber attached to it has had to be shrunk because there's less space. And bear in mind, the Duo has an additional thermal hurdle that it has to overcome because when you're using the thing shut, it's like a display sandwich where any heat that's generated on the inside is going to have an extremely hard job dissipating outside. So, if we run a stress test for 20 minutes and jump over to the thermal view, can you see how compared to the iPhone 18 Pro Max, much less of the internal heat is reaching the outside of the phone? It appears to be cooler, but that's because the heat is trapped. And you can see this reflected in the results. While the Duo's performance does already start slightly lower than the Pro Max's, it
also falls faster as the stress test goes on. Although, worth noting that it still quite handily beats out Samsung's equivalent. You'll notice a similar compromise when you open up the foldables because while heat isn't getting trapped anymore, you now just have a larger, higher resolution display that you have to power. And that's demanding in its own way. Are you going to notice these differences day-to-day? Slightly, not massively. It's just yet another smaller thing to add to the list, but probably shouldn't individually swing your decision. But if there's anything that is going to, it's got to be the cameras, right? Because this on paper is the single biggest
compromise that you have to make if you're going to go Duo. The main camera sensor is about 33% smaller than the Pro with no variable aperture. There is no telephoto camera at all. The outer selfie camera is 12 MP instead of the Pro's 18. And then the inner selfie camera, this under display thing, shoots at just four. So, it sounds really bad. In practice, it actually surprised me a little because like this main camera for example, it sucks a lot less than I was expecting it to. I think clearly the A20 Pro chip is doing the heavy lifting because in terms of skin tones, even in terms of like detail, I think most people will struggle to tell the difference during the daytime. And this is just as true for photos. The key
thing that separates the two is just the slight extra natural background blur that you're going to get on the Pro. I was expecting the Duo to tank when it comes to low light because I mean, if we're being very honest, it's not exactly a massive sensor on the thing. But when you compare that to the Pro, yes, you'll notice differences. I don't think the Duo is at all doing badly. In fact, to make that point, let's bring in the Galaxy Z Fold 8 for a minute. I would actually go as far as to say that the difference between the Samsung and the Duo is actually larger than the difference between the Duo and the Pro.
Like just look at the softness of my face or you know that stuff in the background that's just become pure noise on the Samsung. I thought that the clarity of speech might give it away. After all, the Duo doesn't inherit the studio-grade four microphone array that the Pros have. But I have tried so many side-by-sides in so many different types of scenarios. And if this is what the Pro sounds like, this is what the Duo sounds like. It's kind of just a reminder of how disproportionately large of a part that software tuning and processing are now playing in the modern camera experience. But one thing that no amount of processing is going to be able to fix is the eradication of that telephoto
camera. Because let's say you're at a concert and you want to zoom in on the performer. The absolute maximum amount of zoom you're going to get out of the Duo is six times in video. And of course, that's entirely digital. So I mean, you're just asking to get bullied if you post this somewhere. Now, this whole long-range zoom thing is very annoying, but is only going to crop up very irregularly. So the thing that I'm actually more concerned about is the slightly annoying thing that's going to crop up all the time. And that's portrait mode. Because there's no telephoto, you basically have to choose on this Duo. Do you want to use the main camera and go super close, which gives
you a full-quality portrait, but is going to distort the proportions of your subject, or do you take a step back and use digital zoom, at which point you get much nicer, more correct proportions, but then the image quality takes a dive. And then, you've got the selfie compromise. So, when the Duo is folded up, you get a 12-megapixel camera versus the Pro's 18. And let's put it this way, you will not confuse the two. The Pro is not just significantly higher resolution, but captures way more around you if you want to go wide. And then, the inner selfie camera is, to probably absolutely no one's surprise, absolutely tragic. It genuinely looks like I'm shooting this through a pre-compressed Instagram filter. Apple
specifically calls this a FaceTime camera, and I would say, uh, stick to that. You can take selfies with it, but don't. I would say, if you have your phone open and you decide that you want to, what you should actually do is flip the whole thing around, swipe this icon, which deactivates the inner screen and then activates the outer screen, and then use this to take the selfie with your main set of rear cameras. And to give the Duo its flowers, the fact that you can even do that to film on this selfie camera over here is a massive perk, because while it is a bit of a maneuver, you could argue that it takes selfies on this phone from the worst that an iPhone has had in the last
decade to easily the best. Plus, as well as the main camera, which then looks like this, this also opens up the opportunity to use your rear ultra-wide, which is extraordinarily wide, while still being, I would say, very good quality for selfie standards. And it's all finished off with a couple of little extras, like these kid Q animations to capture the interest of your little ones, which is a good idea, but feels a little proof of concept right now, cuz there's literally zero configurability. And then, the other one is Smart Take, which I can't see myself using. It lets you prop the phone up, and it'll then just capture automatically when it thinks you're posing, and let you know with the
flash each time it's taken something, which sounds interesting. But, in my testing, it can't really tell whether I'm posing or just yawning or stretching. So, you just end up with a pile of junk photos in between your good ones. And most of all, it just reminded me how much better another person is going to be at framing your photos as opposed to just leaving your phone at an angle that you think might work without seeing the end composition. So, is the Duo's camera a deal breaker? For me personally, yes. I'd miss the telephoto too much. I'd miss having the best main camera and even just the nitty-gritty pro controls. But, I also think that if you care even a little bit less than I
do and you're happy with the Duo to flip the thing around every time you want to take selfies, then it's not actually as big of a sacrifice as you might think. But, cameras are not the only thing that gets squeezed when you split a phone in two. There's often less room for speakers, too. So, here's how the Duo sound. Hopefully, you could tell the difference. Vocals not as crisp on the Duo as they are the Pro. As far as folding phones go, it's not bad, but because you don't actually have a speaker unit that's facing you when the thing's opened, clarity is going to
suffer. But, if there's one thing that a giant folding display has the potential to not just reduce, but absolutely murder, it's going to be battery life. So, I run a small combination of intensive and not so intensive apps, also including Samsung Z Fold A in the comparison, and partway through the test, also closed up the two folding phones to factor in that most people probably will spend about half their time using them like this. And assuming that you have that balance, I actually found that the battery isn't bad at all. The Duo came out on top of not just Samsung, but also the smaller iPhone 18 Pro. So, battery is not going to be a problem. Equally though, the Duo is still some way away from the 18 Pro
Max, so if that's your alternative option, then you are leaving a lot of juice on the table, especially since the Pro Max that I have here is the physical SIM smaller capacity version with slightly slower charging, too. Now that the phones were flat, I plugged each one in for exactly 20 minutes, and the Duo came out bottom of the pack with 42%. That's not tragic by any means, but a compromise nonetheless compared to both Samsung and other iPhones. And bear in mind, these are the fast speeds which you only get with Apple's new chargers or something like the Taurus Flash iDock, the interactive alternative. It detects exactly which model is being plugged in to match it with the optimal balance of charging speed and
temperature. It gives you wattage and real-time battery level, and it's just a bit of fun, too, with all these expressions and even vibrations. Link below for more on Taurus. So, the more that I keep testing this phone, the more that I feel like we're just going round and collecting this growing list of small asterisks, caveats that each on their own are nowhere near deal breakers, but if you stack enough of them up, they start to feel like one. And I think for me, the one that tips it is the ergonomics. Because with a foldable phone, and really this foldable phone more than most, you spend a lot of your day stretching, juggling, and maneuvering the thing just to use it
normally. You're going to open and close it like 50 times a day. That's a two-handed operation every time. The volume buttons have been shunted up to this odd position at the top. So, there's a little reshuffle whenever you want to touch them. And even closed, I find the far side of this screen a little out of reach. And I think this is because while it might look like this very pretty, very cute little passport-size device from the front, there is nothing cute about the heft of it. This thing is almost 30% thicker than an iPhone 18 Pro Max. So, you find that it really fills out your hand, and you have to grip it properly. Same against the smaller 18-Pro, while also being about 20% heavier than that phone.
I even found that when mounted on most of my MagSafe stands and chargers, the weight actually causes the phone to pivot on its own when it's open. So, when you start to put all of this together, it really does make me wonder. The small hassles this thing saves you on the odd occasion that you need to split screen two apps or you really need to juggle a few tabs like this in Safari, is that actually more than canceled out by the hassle that this thing adds every single time you pick it up? Not to mention, the two biggest asterisks of all, the price, how the Duo is not just as expensive as the Pro Max, but literally $700 more, and the durability. While it will no
doubt help that Apple's fitted this with a titanium body and managed to still preserve the IP68 water and dust resistance, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this phone has way more ways to break and way more room for wear and tear than any normal bar phone. So, I would say, if you've used foldables before and you know what you're in for and you still really, really want a Duo, then go for it. It does do some extremely cool things. But, if you're new to foldables and your kind of default alternative option would be a Pro or a Pro Max, I would strongly steer you this way. I think it's a better phone.
All right. Catch you in the next one.
