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The iPhone Duo should have been an iPad

23 October 2026 at 19:00
Vergecast hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel are pictured with an iPhone Duo.

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it be a better product if it started as an iPad rather than an iPhone? Would we feel differently about this thing if it were simply called the iPad Du …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The first broken iPhone Duos are here

23 October 2026 at 18:37
An iPhone Duo is shown opened, with bright lines along the hinge and the right side of the display.

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display.

Here's how one user in Australia described what happened to their phone:

Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times.

I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen.

As I cont …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Our best tips for using the iPhone Duo

23 October 2026 at 16:00
It’s been a long time since we had to rethink how to use an iPhone. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The Duo is an entirely new kind of iPhone, so it comes with a bit of a learning curve. That's a wild thing to imagine, since the iPhone has had very few fundamental changes since its inception. But the Duo is built different. If you won the preorder lottery and managed to get your hands on one today, you'll see what that means. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll lose track of the volume buttons as you turn the thing around.

We've learned a few tricks over the past week of flipping and folding the Duo as much as we could. Here are our favorite tips and hacks for newly minted Duo owners.

You can set orientation lock on each screen independent …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple revives the original iPod as an Apple Music easter egg

23 October 2026 at 15:58
An Apple Music 404 page shows an interactive first-generation iPod.

If you've been feeling nostalgic for your old iPod, you can head over to Apple Music's 404 page to listen to music on a virtual re-creation of the first-generation iPod. The hidden iPod was spotted by users on social media on Friday. It's appropriately stocked with music from the early 2000s, like Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" or Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." The iPod seems to pop up on any non-existent Apple Music page, so you can find it by just adding a string of random letters after the main Apple Music URL.

theres a hidden fully functional ipod as a 404 page on apple music https://t.co/vLYpnkHG4x pic.twitter.com/0cSz4SF1kp

- Kian (@kianworld …

Read the full story at The Verge.

No, the iPhone Duo isn’t a small phone

23 October 2026 at 12:00
An iPhone 13 Mini next to an iPhone Duo. The 13 Mini is only slightly taller but much thinner than the Duo.
Don’t be fooled; only one of these is a truly small phone (it’s the iPhone 13 Mini on the left).

When we published our review of the iPhone Duo, I got a lot of hopeful questions from my fellow Mini fans who took note of the cover screen's Mini-ish 5.4-inch size. "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've been looking for.

I wish it was. I like a small phone. I own an iPhone 13 Mini that I refuse to surrender, even though it barely lasts a full day.

But the Duo is thick and heavy. You will feel its weight every time you read an email, scroll Instagram, or put it in your pocket. It is a dense phone, and after a week with the Duo, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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