Apple’s iPhone Duo: The first hands-on reaction from tech reviewers

Nilay Patel, also with The Verge, highlighted the Duo’s slick mode transitions (see the clip above). He started playing Netflix on the outer screen.

When he opened the Duo, the movie automatically played on the full open screen, or on half the screen when the Duo was hinged half open to prop it up.

The smart transitions between the Duo’s four cameras (one front, one inner, two on the back) also impressed.

“A lot of people are going to be into this thing... and it’s crazy expensive,” Patel said.

Verge dubbed the pricing “bananas”.

In NZ, the Duo will sell for between $4199 (256GB) and $6599 (2TB) depending on storage options.

The Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen said she’d never considered buying a foldable – various models have been on the market from others for seven years – but that “I could actually picture myself using this new half-phone, half-tablet hybrid”.

Nguyen added: “For months, I’ve been using Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8, a similarly squat, passport-shaped foldable that opens up to a larger screen. It’s impressively thin and can easily fit into the infuriatingly tiny pockets in women’s pants and dresses. Samsung did a lot of work to minimise the crease – the dip between the two halves of the big interior display – but it’s still clearly there.”

People who haven’t used a foldable will be keenly interested in the crease down the middle of the unfolded screen and whether it will wreck the experience.

But having used a Fold8 myself – albeit for a few days rather than a few weeks – I’d say Nguyen is being a bit tough on the Fold8.

I can’t see the crease unless the light hits it at a certain angle, and I can’t feel it at normal finger swipe speed (if you slow down, you can feel it). The same goes for Oppo’s Find N6. Both are streets ahead of early foldables.

Nguyen went on, “When I held the iPhone Duo open, the crease was barely visible. As I slid my finger across the display, I could feel it, but it’s more subtle than Samsung’s. Most of the time, the screen looked as flat and smooth as the one on an iPad.”

Apple employed both software and hardware techniques to camouflage the crease, Nguyen said. “The matte surface of the interior 7.6-inch screen minimises reflections to hide it. (Samsung’s Fold 8 screen is shiny.)

“The crease on the inner screen is barely visible, but you can feel it as you slide your finger across the display.”

The Journal writer does allow that Samsung has rights to a thinner and lighter foldable. Its Fold8 is 201g to the Duo’s 254g.

And while the Duo is the thinnest iPhone ever when unfurled, closed it’s 11.3mm, a schick thicker than the Fold’s 9.7mm.

Tech Radar’s Jamie Richards said the Duo was “undoubtedly the star” of Apple’s event.

“Like every other tech fan in the world right now, I want one.”

The foldable could act as an “intelligent personal hub”.

But he also said several features were snipped to save space: a telephoto lens (you get 2x optical zoom to the new iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max’s 8x), there’s no Face ID (you do get TouchID on the side) and there’s no Action button.

MacWorld’s Jason Cross said, “It’s all about flexibility.”

“One thing the rumours didn’t pick up on: both the inner and outer displays have the same aspect ratio: 1:1.4. That makes the outer display exactly one half of the inner display, and Apple uses this symmetry, along with a lot of orientation sensing, to alter the way iOS works.

“Currently, many iOS apps, and the operating system itself, do not adjust to multiple orientations. With the Duo, Apple has updated its own apps to work in portrait or landscape, and even behave differently depending on whether they’re on the outside or inside screen.”

He added, “The trick is that apps can adapt to present themselves to both the dual-screen nature and shifting orientations of iPhone Duo.

“You can show your FaceTime call on the outer display as well as the inside, so other people can see and participate in the call. You can partially fold the phone and use it that way and the interface reacts.

“Fold it like a tent and it goes into Standby mode to show big clock, calendar, photo, and weather widgets – even when you’re not charging.

“Apple even showed a quick glimpse of the Duo acting like a tiny laptop with touchscreen keys.”

The Financial Times’ Richard Waters said, “It says something about a significant new product announcement when the thing that Wall Street is most anticipating is not the thing itself but the price tag.

“Early reactions to the first foldable iPhone suggest Apple can still inspire the sort of gadget fetishism that made it the doyen of consumer electronics.”

Ternus faced the business challenge of maintaining affordability as “the sharp increase in memory chip prices caused by the data centre boom”.

“A passport-sized smartphone that unfolds to create a screen only slightly smaller than an iPad mini, the Duo is a premium gadget that could nudge up the company’s average selling prices, though it will first have to prove that a hybrid can fill more than a small niche,” Waters said.

There were some intriguing new iPhone 18 and Watch features that got a bit lost amid the Duo hype.

The Apple Watch Series 12 features a “live rewind” always-on audio-recording feature that lets you double-tap its crown to see a transcription of the last 15 seconds of real-life audio if, say, you missed what a waiter said about a special.

And with the new 18 series handsets, there’s a new “Reference Image” mode, which could prove useful in the age of AI manipulation.

It provides 18 Pro and Pro Max users with an unalterable reference version of a photo, visually confirming what the sensor saw at the moment of capture.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.