No, the iPhone Duo isn’t a small phone

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, my 13 Mini feels almost comically light. Like, can this be a real phone? Surely not.

The Duo’s front panel is also quite a bit wider than the 13 Mini — 84.1mm compared to 64.2mm — which makes it much harder to reach your thumb all the way across like you can with the Mini. The Duo tries to compensate for this by putting controls on the right side, which helps a bit. As reported by Wired, Apple is also planning to add its reachability feature to the Duo later this year to help out in those moments. But inevitably there’s something I need to tap that’s out of one-handed reach on the Duo, and the illusion of using a small phone is gone. On the other hand, you get a much larger onscreen keyboard with the Duo; the Mini’s feels cramped by comparison.

It comes down to this: Liking a small phone isn’t the same thing as liking a small screen. Sure, all things being equal, a big screen is nicer for a lot of stuff. But I’ll put up with a tiny screen to enjoy the benefits of a phone so small I can forget it’s in my pocket. It’s a tradeoff. The iPhone Duo offers a different set of tradeoffs. Put up with the small screen on the outside, and you’ll be rewarded with a really big screen whenever you need it. And that small screen is attached to a big, heavy phone.

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This sounds like I hated using the Duo, but I didn’t. I just had to calibrate my expectations. I think you’ll be disappointed by the Duo if you expect a small phone that expands into an iPad Mini. But if you go in expecting a small-screen experience you can tolerate in order to get a much bigger screen whenever you want, you’ll have the right idea about the Duo.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge

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