This is Twit. For almost two decades now, the iPhone has changed in small and careful ways. Apple, though, has made its biggest bet on the shape of its phone since the very first one. It's a device that unfolds into something new and, frankly, asks longtime iPhone users like many of our listeners to rethink the habits that they've had for years. So, we have to ask: is it the future of the iPhone, or is it just a very expensive first draft? Here to tell us, after a week of folding, flipping, and living with it, is The Verge's senior smartphone reviewer, Allison Johnson. Welcome to the show, Allison.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Absolutely. So, let's get right into it. Apple's first foldable has finally joined the market. I think, in comparison to other foldables, it's shaped less like that tall slab and instead is more like a passport. So for folks who haven't held one yet, which is most people, what is the iPhone Duo like closed versus open, and then how did that shape change the way that you actually used it day-to-day?
Yeah. So, Apple did go with this kind of passport shape. And, you know, as you mentioned, a lot of the previous book-style foldables have been in that more tall and narrow kind of format. So, I've got the phone here. It's a sort of... it's tough to use one-handed, honestly, on the cover screen. It's a small screen. It's a 5.4-inch display, and a good chunk of the side of the front is taken up by a control panel. So it's, you know, it's fine for quick text, scrolling through email, just whatever you want to do quickly on your phone. I enjoy a small screen, honestly. I'm like an iPhone mini girly.
Yeah. But it is kind of a heavy, chunky phone, so you do tend to want to open it up, and that's where I think this phone really shines, is having that wide aspect screen. Not just that, but the matte finish on the display is very nice. So everything sort of nudges you toward that experience, and I think that's the one that people will really be drawn to and really enjoy.
Yeah. And one of the... I mean, you touched on it there, and it's something that I've been considering because I am left-handed. One of the loudest reactions online after the announcement was about the one-handed use, especially from left-handed people. I didn't say anything out loud, but I was thinking it. They were worried about controls living on the right side, right? Along with plenty of people, this is where I did get loud, wondering how they'd feel about trading Face ID, the beautiful, wonderful Face ID, for Touch ID. So, now that you've had the opportunity to live with it, I'd like to know what was holding and unlocking the Duo really like? Did you find anything that made it easier? And also, what's your day-to-day smartphone and your kind of typical unlocking use case?
Yeah. So, the funny thing that happened is just being so used to Face ID being there. I would pick up the phone and, you know, your notifications are sort of bunched up, and I would just stare at it waiting for Face ID to kick in. And then the notifications would expand. Obviously, that didn't happen, and I had to be like, 'Oh, yeah, Touch ID.' I got used to it. It was okay. It didn't ruin my life. It feels a little slow. There is a deliberate kind of lag, so you aren't just launched right into your home screen, it sounds like. And you can tweak that in the settings. I didn't end up doing that. What I did do, just in the past couple days, is enable the Apple Watch integration where you can unlock it with your watch. And that has felt a lot faster for me and much more like, okay, I am just jumping into whatever I'm doing, because I am frequently like holding a cup of coffee and doing something and having to reposition my hand and then wait wasn't my favorite experience.
So the other thing that will happen to you is that you kind of, by its nature, turn the phone into different positions. You can do all the things where it's like kind of folded in half, or you open it up and you rotate it to portrait orientation, and all of a sudden the buttons are in totally different places. So one of the hot tips we got was to enroll a lot of fingers, so you always have a finger that's close by where the Touch ID is, so you're not reaching around with your thumb.
That makes sense. That makes sense.
So, a lot of people seem to assume that the Duo simply opens up into an iPad, but it's not really how Apple built it. So what happens when you open an app on that inner screen? And how much does your experience depend on which app you're using? I know that, in leading up to this, I went around on Reddit and social media to see kind of what are the questions that everyone seems to have and what are maybe the misunderstandings that people have before getting a chance to talk to you. And yeah, that's something I kept seeing in response to people who were saying, 'I'm interested in this phone.' People saying, 'Isn't it just opens up and it's an iPad inside? Why not just have an iPad mini?' But the software, as you said, seems to encourage people to go to that bigger inside screen and use that experience.
