When we published our iPhone Duo review, I received a lot of hopeful questions from fellow Mini fans who took note of the Mini-ish 5.4-inch size of the clamshell display. “Is this… a small phone that turns into a tablet?” they asked. And I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no. The Duo is not the small phone we were looking for.
But the Duo is thick and heavy. You’ll feel its weight every time you read an email, scroll through Instagram, or put it in your pocket. It’s a dense phone, and after a week with the Duo, my 13 Mini feels almost comically light. Can this be a real phone? Surely not.
The Duo’s front panel is also a bit wider than the 13 Mini’s (84.1mm compared to 64.2mm), making it much harder to fully reach your thumb like you can with the Mini. The Duo tries to compensate for this by placing the controls on the right side, which helps a little. As reported by cabling, Apple also plans to add its accessibility feature to the Duo later this year to help in those times. But inevitably there’s something I need to touch that’s just out of reach on the Duo, and the illusion of using a small phone disappears. On the other hand, with the Duo you get a much larger on-screen keyboard; In comparison, the Mini feels cramped.
It all comes down to this: liking a small phone is not the same as liking a small phone. screen. Of course, all things being equal, a big screen is better for many things. But I’ll tolerate a small screen to enjoy the benefits of a phone so small I can forget it’s in my pocket. It’s a compensation. The iPhone Duo offers a different set of trade-offs. Accept the small screen on the outside and you’ll be rewarded with a really big screen when you need it. And that small screen is attached to a big, heavy phone.
It seems like I hated using Duo, but I didn’t. I just had to calibrate my expectations. I think you’ll be disappointed with the Duo if you’re expecting a small phone that expands into an iPad Mini. But if you’re hoping for a small screen experience that you can tolerate to get a much larger screen whenever you want, you’ll have the right idea about the Duo.
Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge
