GoKawiilWith the iPhone Duo, Apple has pulled off a familiar trick. It arrives into a mature Android foldable market with a handful of hardware features we’ve mostly already seen elsewhere, but paired with a level of software polish that makes a lot of them feel new again. It’s those software flourishes that have me excited to try the iPhone Duo when it launches next month, but I’m less convinced that its hardware will be anything special.
If Apple had gotten there first, the Duo’s biggest surprise would have been its squat, wide, passport-inspired shape. But its slow-moving supply chain meant that Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi all managed to beat Apple to market with similarly sized rivals, so the unusual design already feels fairly familiar — helped by Samsung’s aggressive efforts to market its new design.
More has been made of Apple’s efforts to eliminate the foldable display’s crease, which seem to have been largely successful. Apple attributes it to a 100-component hinge, custom adhesives that allow the display layers to “glide” over one another, and a matte finish that reduces glare and reflections to make the crease harder to spot. Trying the phone at Apple’s event yesterday, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said that you can’t really see the crease, but that “if you go looking for it, you can definitely feel one.”
It sounds, and looks, impressive, but Apple is far from the first to do it. Samsung made great strides in eliminating the crease on its Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra thanks to new titanium display layers. Before that, Oppo all but eliminated its Find N6 crease by using 3D printing to fill the minute gaps across the hinge. I’d have to see all those phones side by side to see which crease is subtlest, but even if Apple does win, it won’t be by much.
None of the iPhone Duo’s other standout hardware features are true firsts either. Google beat it to an IP68 rating, now even surpassed by Honor’s IP69. Samsung, Oppo, and Honor have all offered stylus support before — though Samsung has since dropped it. Samsung also moved on from the under-display selfie camera, which has always been hamstrung by poor photo and video quality and a distractingly visible patch on the screen.
Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
In other ways, the hardware even feels behind the competition. The Duo is the thickest of this new wave of wide foldables, though at 5.2mm when open it’s still thinner than the iPhone Air. The weight is a more obvious issue: the 254g Duo is 26 percent heavier than the Z Fold 8 — a 53g difference — which is going to be pretty noticeable. You have to go back to 2022’s Z Fold 4 to find a Samsung foldable that’s heavier, TriFold excluded.
There’s also no evidence that Apple has adopted silicon-carbon batteries yet, which have allowed Samsung, Motorola, and other Android manufacturers to fit bigger capacities into the smaller spaces of foldable phones. Apple says the phone should still deliver a full 24 hours of regular use, but Honor’s Magic V6 uses silicon-carbon to deliver two days of life.
The rear cameras are pretty basic too, with a pair of 48-megapixel shooters and no telephoto. That’s almost an exact match for the cameras on the Z Fold 8, but Google, Motorola, Xiaomi and others are now providing capable triple cameras across their foldable lines, and the iPhone Duo already lags behind.
It looks as good as any Android foldable on paper, but it doesn’t look better than many of them.
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