WHEN iPhone Duo preorders opened online in mid-October, I wasn’t fast enough, so the Apple Store gave me a delivery date of February 2027. Even that slot meant paying the full P159,990 upfront. What’s the point? Apple would hold my money for four months, so I decided to sit it out. There was no time to check stock at Apple’s authorized resellers either.
Then a friend changed his mind. A fellow Apple user, he picked up his preordered Duo on Oct. 30, the day it went on sale here. He put the money toward an iMac instead and sold me the phone, still unopened. So I ended up with his 256GB model, the lowest tier. That is not enough for me, but I have 2TB of iCloud storage, and most of my photos sit there and in Google Photos.
My work runs on Apple’s ecosystem, and my iPhone 15 Pro Max is three years old. Each new model since then has looked like the last one with a slightly better camera and a faster chip, so I skipped them. As of this writing, I have used the Duo for six days.
Upgrades make me nervous because passwords get lost or the transfer fails. This one went smoothly. The iCloud backup worked, and the embedded SIM (eSIM) transfer from my Globe plan was seamless.
My banking app and digital wallet don’t call my phone an iPhone Duo. Both list it as “iPhone19,4,” the model identifier Apple uses internally for this hardware. My guess is the apps have no name on file for it yet. Changing passwords also locked me out of both apps for a few hours, so make the switch on a day when you don’t need to pay anyone.
The Duo works on eSIM only. My Smart plan runs on a physical SIM, so that switch is next on my list.
Folded, the Duo took me back to my first iPhone and the excitement I felt in 2008, when Globe launched the iPhone 3G here. The height and thickness are close, but the Duo is wider and squarer, and it opens into a mini tablet. At 254 grams, it weighs about 1.9 times as much as my iPhone 3G, which weighed 133 grams — the cost of two screens, a titanium hinge and two batteries.
An iPad mini has always been on my wish list, but carrying two gadgets never appealed to me. My first iPad sat mostly unused, so a MacBook and an iPhone did the work. The Duo is a phone and a tablet in one. Open it partway and it looks like a small laptop. It feels more like a productivity machine, and I don’t feel like scrolling on it. As a laptop replacement, it is a long stretch. But my MacBook Pro is heavy, so I don’t always bring it along. I wrote the first draft of this column on it. Over the long weekend, I brought only the Duo and revised the draft on the go.
The split screen gets the most use. While revising this column, I had Apple’s Duo spec page open on one side and my draft in Notes on the other. Some third-party apps still don’t use the big screen.
The compact outer screen suits me. It shows fewer messages than my 15 Pro Max, but it sits comfortably in one hand. The inner screen has a matte nano-texture finish that cuts glare and makes the crease almost invisible. Compared with the glossy screen on my 15 Pro Max, the contrast is slightly lower and the colors less saturated.
Losing Face ID turned out to be no big deal. Touch ID on the side button responds right away, and my Apple Watch unlocks the Duo the way Face ID would.
The folding screen’s durability worries me. CBS News reported owners finding cracks on the inner screen near the hinge. Apple said the issue affects “a small number of iPhone Duo units” and offered replacements to affected owners. AppleCare+ isn’t available for iPhones here, even though Apple sells it in Singapore, Malaysia and, since February, Indonesia. When I asked Apple Support, they told me to take care of my phone, which is a lot to ask for something this expensive. Then again, I have used iPhones since 2008 without AppleCare.
The cameras are a compromise too, especially the poor-quality under-display camera and the reduced zoom compared with the Pro Max. Since I barely use the telephoto camera, that is not a deal breaker.
After nine hours of heavy use on mobile data, 90 percent of which was on the outer screen, the battery was down to 20 percent. That is not great at this price. To be fair, a new iPhone spends its first days restoring backups and indexing photos, and a weak cellular signal may also have played a part.
So far, the Duo makes the most sense for people who switch between an iPhone and an iPad mini all day. For most buyers, the price will decide it, and a first-generation foldable iPhone is still a gadget for tech enthusiasts. Had I waited for the Apple Store, I would still have three months to go.