The iPhone Duo is here. If you fancy spending as much as a MacBook Pro on a bend-o-phone with an Apple logo, boy are you going to want to save up your pennies before the 16 October pre-order date. But now that an iPhone can multitask, letting you use more than one app at once, maybe you don’t even need a Mac now, right? And definitely not an iPad? Spoiler: wrong. Second spoiler: I’m miffed about this, because so many other decisions Apple made about the iPhone Duo software are really good.
I know. Usually, I’m grumpy, cynical and jaded. I’d normally write a piece called ‘iPhone Duo-no’ and recycle the ‘two bad’ pun from my Retroid Pocket Duo column. Especially because, at the time of writing, it’s very late into an evening which found me sitting through a strangely dull and uncanny valley Apple keynote that made me pine for the days when execs excitedly bounded about on stage in front of an audience of real, living humans.
But Apple sweated the details. It just left some big ones out too – entirely intentionally.
Two good
The smartest element of the iPhone Duo’s take on iOS and software is a fluidity that permeates the entire design. The outer to inner screen transition is seamless, expanding the canvas without you losing your place. I’m in two minds about Apple moving toolbar buttons to the right-hand edge, setting fire to decades of convention, but the way apps function looks great.
Since most iPhone apps already have iPad incarnations, it should come as no surprise that Apple’s fold-o-phone app game, right out of the gate, betters much of what Android has to offer. What Apple demonstrated didn’t look like a work in progress. App layouts just worked. Whichever orientation the phone was held in, the results looked natural, usable and optimal.
Sure, the demo was stage-managed to within an inch of its life, but there was a lot to love. The two-up display in portrait with a video above a messaging app. A version of StandBy, including a wake-up glow alarm, when the device is set on a surface as an upside-down V. Animations on the front screen to make your kid actually pay attention while you snap a photo using the inner display. And a bunch of other clever ideas when the phone masquerades as a book or a Nintendo DS.
Sure, Android has done some of this before. But it’s rarely done it well.
Pad idea
Apple also mentioned upcoming Pencil support. And, yes: “Nobody wants a stylus.” But that Steve Jobs quote comes from 2007, Apple often changes its mind, and the context was more about a mandated stylus than an optional one anyway. As plenty of artists will tell you, a scribbling stick can help you do great things on an iPad.
An iPad. That is still where I get stuck. Apple admitted the Duo’s distraction-free inner display was inspired by its tablet, and its dimensions echo the iPad mini’s screen. But while Apple claimed the iPhone Duo was the “most versatile iPhone ever”, I thought: it’s still an iPhone.
Perhaps that’s unfair. No other iPhone can show two apps at once. But that just means the Duo can sometimes pretend to be an iPad from 2015. There are no freeform app windows and we’ve had no indication the Duo has optimal external display support. On a device with a price that matches a MacBook Pro’s and that costs more than four times an entry level iPad, Apple still limits the software because it wants you to buy more gear.
I never really believed we’d get one Apple device to rule them all. WWDC put paid to that. But in this economy, when even a mid-range Android blower can drive a desktop experience, the iPhone maxing out at what an iPad could do a decade ago doesn’t feel amazing. And that is, well, two bad.
