// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
The iPhone Duo’s hardware doesn’t look special, but its software might be
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Android foldables have done most of this before, but rarely looked so good doing it.
Android foldables have done most of this before, but rarely looked so good doing it.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
With 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.”