[00:00] Today was Apple's iPhone event, and it was a very interesting hardware story for them because they announced their foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. Now, for me going into this thing, I had very low expectations because it's a foldable phone.
[00:14] These things have been around since 2019. Apple's putting in so late to this that I was like, how interesting could this possibly be? But here's the thing. This has always been Apple's strength, to wait until they feel like they can deliver a user experience
[00:27] that is like the Apple way, and only then do they shoot their shot. And today's product is a perfect example of why Apple waits as long as they do, and when they deliver it, it really impresses people.
[00:41] So when I picked this thing up, the first thought that I had after like 10 seconds was, as a community, as a tech community, we have been so tolerant of years of mediocre foldable phone experiences.
[00:55] iPhone Duo is just so far ahead of the curve. Now in hand it doesn't feel particularly light. It's a titanium frame but if anything I'd say that it felt heavier than I expected or heavier than I hoped it would be because foldable phones
[01:09] have gotten like so light these days. This is a relatively heavy one but it fit in my pocket perfectly fine. It didn't feel bulky or clunky or anything like that. It just is a little bit heavier than the lightest stuff out
[01:21] there. Now when you open it the first thing you'll notice is the animation on that front screen where it seems almost like that front screen is like a pane of glass you can see through and they put so much effort into this animation it doesn't just fade away it's got
[01:35] some refracting and the distortion changes depending on the angle that the screen is it's really cool but at the same time it's super simple like when I look at this when you look at this it seems so obvious that this is something that companies should have done over the past
[01:51] seven years. Like, how hard could this have possibly been? But I feel like companies have never put in that effort, that, like, attention to detail that Apple typically does. So, Apple took
[02:03] something so simple as, like, the opening of this device, and they used it as an opportunity to flex the Apple Ray, right? This is how we do things. And you, just that animation off the rip, it's like,
[02:16] okay, they put effort into this thing. So the front display is a 5.4 inch Super Retina XDR. It looks really good, but it looks kind of typical for an Apple flagship, and the brightness looks good in the demo space. There is no face ID, presumably because the cameras required for facial biometrics
[02:32] are too big to make it work in this particular form factor. So you have touch ID on the right. You can obviously hit that with your right thumb, but if you're left-handed, you could use like your left index or your left middle finger. It does feel like a device that is best suited for right-handed
[02:49] people though. Now the inside display, the big one, has a really nice aspect ratio for watching content, nice viewing angles, 7.6 inches, and this screen is phenomenal. Now the first thing you'll notice when you look at it or even touch it is that it's got a matte display. It's got the same
[03:04] kind of tech as the MacBook display. They call it nanotexture. I think it's slightly different from the MacBook itself because when you touch it the iPhone Duo it feels like silkier and smoother at least from my memory compared to a MacBook NanoTouch display but it nice to touch and look at
[03:22] Now, that matte finish does reduce the kind of color pop of brilliance that you would typically see on an OLED panel, on a glossy OLED panel. The diffusion of that Nano texture does kind of reduce some of the contrast and some of the poppiness of the colors,
[03:36] but I think it looks good. One concern I do have, though, is that the nanotexture finish on the MacBooks are notoriously difficult to clean. Because it's textured, it kind of holds the oils and the materials in the patterning on that glass,
[03:51] and I do wonder if that's going to be something that affects the cleanliness or cleanability of the iPhone Duo down the line, but we'll have to see. The other thing I noticed was the crease, because this is the closest thing I've seen to a creaseless foldable experience.
[04:05] You can still feel it, and if you tilt it at the right angle, you can kind of see it sometimes, but it is almost a creaseless experience. And I think the matte finish is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
[04:17] I think it does hide the kind of visual imperfections when you look for creases, but it just looks so good. The big screen has its own selfie cam, and this one is an under-display selfie camera.
[04:30] This is the first under-display camera that we've seen Apple implement, and from what I saw, the image seemed decent. I couldn't do as heavy testing on it, but when you do have the screen activated, it does hide the camera quite well.
[04:43] So in the past when I've done videos on foldable phones, I have said multiple times that the component that makes and breaks foldable phones is the hinge. It's the thing that defines how good these products are
[04:55] because companies will spend so much time and R&D funding just to make a good hinge, like a really good hinge. and this hinge from Apple is just, it's amazing. It's, I think, the best one on the market.
[05:08] You want a hinge that obviously opens up as flat as possible to hide creases, but you also want that hinge, like when you close it up, you want it to be gentle on the panel, so all the different layers and all the adhesives in there don't move around. You want it to be a gentle close when you close it,
[05:22] but you also want it to have like a nice snap when you close it and a nice snap when you open it, and ideally you'd like these hinges to be able to like hold into a certain position halfway through the fold, so you can have like, you know, like a mini computer mode.
[05:34] And you also want it to be waterproof, or as waterproof as you get. This one's IP68, and you also want these hinges to be durable. And it seems like Apple's hinge does all of this really well. And they also seemingly do something similar to what Oppo does on the Find N6,
[05:48] where each individual hinge is scanned for like imperfections, and then they'll squirt this liquid polymer on it to kind of flatten it out as much as... At least that's what it seemed like they were doing. They didn't have any video demonstrations of it,
[06:00] but I've looked at the Apple hinge up close and it is a very neat method and it seems like a lot of work but it is the thing that allows you to have super flat, almost priceless displays. And might I add, the iPhone Duo sounds so nice when you open and close it.
[06:16] It's got this nice like snap. It's not even a snap, it's like a pop. It just, it sounds so nice. I couldn't capture the audio very well because it was like super loud there but it brought up my ears like it a it sounds nice It also has stereo speakers They placed them in opposite corners and on opposite sides so it doesn matter what orientation you have it it always going to have like a speaker on both sides
[06:38] Even when it's closed, it's still stereo. The Fold 8 did not have that, which I think, you know, it seems like such a minor inconvenience, but it is, at least for me, when I watch something at home and all the sound's coming from one side,
[06:50] it kind of gets annoying after a while. It could be just a mean thing because I'm super old, but I like stereo sound and it's just like it's something that I think companies should take into consideration when making a $2,000 phone and I'm glad that they've done it. In terms of buttons,
[07:05] the power button or the touch ID button is on the side on the top area. There's a camera control below that. The volume buttons are up on the top of the device which might be a little bit weird because it's not immediately obvious as to which is volume up which is volume down. I mean I only
[07:18] spent a little bit of time with it but it just seems like something you'd have to get used to. There is Apple Pencil support on the iPhone Duo. Samsung dropped their pen support on the Fold 7,
[07:30] and then Fold 8 also didn't have it. I'm assuming it's because they're trying to shave down weight as much as possible. When you have a digitizer layer that you feel the bend from the screen, it adds thickness, it adds a little bit of weight, but also adds rigidity.
[07:43] Right now, this layer is a little bit stiffer on the clothes, so you have to compensate for that with a hinge. I'm glad that Apple put it. It's not something that many people use, I don't think, but just the idea of it is what is appealing to me.
[07:56] It's a tablet-type product. It should have pen support. The cameras on the back seem relatively unremarkable. There's two of them. There's a 0.5x ultrawide and then a 48-megapixel main. There is no telephoto.
[08:08] Now, the UI. So in addition to that super cool animation that you see when you open it, unlike a typical slab phone, This iPhone has the dock on the right-hand side arranged in a vertical orientation.
[08:22] And this obviously favors right-handed users. I did ask the people there if there would be software adjustments for left-handed. They said they didn't really know at that time. So the asymmetry of this is just something that I think you get used to.
[08:35] The status bar at the top has also been adjusted. So they've all been collapsed into a cluster of icons to show that information. It looks okay. It doesn't look as visually symmetrical as I'm used to, but I think it just works.
[08:48] Now, the rest of the UI is so well done. So a lot of Apple's first-party apps have already been tweaked and adjusted to take use of this double screen. And the liquid glass icons and how things move around and the multitasking is super intuitive and seems very responsive when I'm testing it.
[09:04] There's also already a bunch of third-party developers who already made visual adjustments to their apps to take advantage of the Surface Duo. And it just looks really good. Having that Netflix window move around and adjust so easily is just really nice.
[09:17] And it was quite apparent, like just seeing a quick demo of it, just how much easier it is for Apple developers to adjust their apps
[09:30] to take advantage of interesting hardware like this. It's one aspect ratio. It's one device, at least for now. And you can tell that the effort that developers have put into their apps to make it look really cool it pays off You can see in the Netflix app there was a reflection of the show that would appear on like the bottom section that would dynamically change depending on the angle of the panel It so silly but it so cool Like the effort is cool
[09:56] Now, a lot of the UI features and the kind of fold and phone features that they showcase on the iPhone Duo are not new. Like the kid cue thing to get kids to smile and look at the camera. and a lot of the camera and photo features
[10:08] have been done by Google and or Samsung on their foldable sometimes years ago. But on the iPhone Duo, there's sometimes a little bit of polish that makes the experience feel a little bit better. Now, this right here is a great example.
[10:21] So they were demoing a 3D game. It was Amazon Zero. And she was like rotating the screen and, you know, just showing the different aspect ratio as it rotates from portrait to landscape.
[10:33] But then she closed the fold. and it went to the outside screen. Now, on an Android foldable, this would most assuredly crash the game. Like, it would just, the game would shut down
[10:45] and you'd have to relaunch it. I've lost multiple Pokemon Unite games because I accidentally closed the screen a little bit too close. This, not only did it, like, go to the front screen and just resume playing as if nothing happened,
[10:57] it even did the animation. Like, that whole see-through screen with, like, the distortion. Like, it seems like such a small detail, But it was so fluid and so well done. When I saw this, this demo here was when I was like, okay, we have just been so tolerant to Google's, like, Android foldables that just, they just don't put in any effort to make the user experience something special.
[11:24] This is a foldable phone, right? It's foldable technology. It is a combination between a phone and a tablet. you could make the user experience feel special. It could feel cool.
[11:36] And you know that a lot of this stuff is going to get copied by other companies. And I'm sure Apple took inspiration and copied directly a bunch of other stuff. But the way that they packaged it, this feels so well put together that it really impressed me.
[11:51] This was so much better than I thought Apple's foldable would be. And it's like a combination of all this stuff put together into a really solid package. Now, the pricing is, as you expect, super expensive.
[12:03] It's $2,000 US for the base model. It's about $100 more than the Fold 8 across all the storage tiers. A couple other notes of other devices that were there. Took a look at the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max.
[12:16] Two things of note, the Dynamic Island, it is smaller this year. You can now have three live activities there. And the variable aperture, it seems kind of neat. There's four settings. You can also see the aperture opening and closing, which is really neat.
[12:30] This isn't the first one to do it. From my early impressions of it, it didn't seem like it made a massive difference, at least not for photos in the setting that I was testing it in that demo space. But again, future review.
[12:42] Okay. Oh, real quick note. The AirPods 5. The ANSI is phenomenal. It's super strong for a wireless earbud that has no seal. I was quite impressed. Okay, there you have it. If you're interested in detailed reviews of this stuff, be subscribed.
[12:57] Hope you guys enjoyed this video.