By Jason Snell

iPhone Duo: 24 hours in the Splash Zone

For a company that’s poised at the cutting edge and focused on innovation, Apple can be quite conservative. It’s a very measure-twice-cut-once kind of company. It prefers innovation of the relentless, iterative sort. It’s harder to feel that pace if you’re the kind of person who buys a new iPhone every year; go without upgrading an Apple device for four or five years and you’ll suddenly see the results of the company’s annual grind.

But while Apple’s careful approach explains why Apple sat on the sidelines for the first years of the folding-smartphone era, once the company decided to get in the game, getting messy was inevitable.

I cover technology professionally, but the reason I do that is because I also love this stuff. There is nothing quite like putting your hand on a new tech product (or, to be fair, a new piece of software!) and discovering all the ways it’s amazing, or weird, or a failure, or—most commonly—a mixture of all of the above.

And that’s why I’m so excited about the iPhone Duo. It is a fascinating mixture, showing off Apple at the top of its game in terms of hardware and software design, while also being fundamentally weird in ways too numerous to count. Apple doesn’t like getting messy, ever, but the first folding iPhone was always going to spatter mud all over Apple’s metaphorical raincoat. Everyone who uses the iPhone Duo is in the splash zone. If you didn’t want to get wet, you shouldn’t have sat in the splash zone!

In my first day with the iPhone Duo, I have experienced the highs and lows that I was expecting. It’s fascinating to see carefully constructed iOS interface conventions crumble under the onslaught of radically new hardware. Control Center is now an icon on the side of the screen. Face ID is gone, replaced with a Touch ID side button that is frequently where you least expect it.

Just as one example, I knew immediately that my iPhone home screen icon placement, honed over many years, was entirely inappropriate for the iPhone Duo. Even the apps I chose to place in my Dock were wrong, because the Dock serves a different purpose on the iPhone Duo! (Dock icons are now smaller, and they’re on the side rather than right at the bottom of the device, so my old approach of using them as a quick-access tab has vanished.)

Among the lows I’ve experienced thus far: Encountering apps not optimized for iPhone Duo, even if they worked perfectly fine on the iPad. As someone who uses the iPad an awful lot, it’s been a constant reminder that even when open, the iPhone Duo is not an iPad; it’s a tablet-like iPhone. And some of my favorite iPad apps open on the iPhone Duo in the “shame rectangle” that makes them essentially unusable (or at the very least, deeply unappealing), because they haven’t explicitly been updated to support the iPhone Duo.

I understand the push and pull between Apple and its developers here, and I’m as sympathetic to why Apple chose not to let iPad apps adapt to the iPhone Duo as I am to the developers who may not have the ability to invest time in updating their apps for the iPhone. Still, the fact remains that I’m shopping for new RSS readers again after several years of settling on one.

I’m sympathetic to reviewers like Brian X. Chen of the New York Times, who apparently had to review the phone in a day, start to finish. If your editor wants it, you gotta do it. But as the editor of Six Colors, I have to be honest: I don’t see the point. All the embargoed reviews that dropped Wednesday were based on a week’s worth of use and consideration; it will take another week before any later reviewers can match that level of experience and consideration.

So I’m taking the slower path. I’m going to use this thing a lot (it’s my phone now, for the time being, and I’m traveling right now so it’s going to get a lot of use!) and I suspect it’s got a lot to teach me—surprising, frustrating, delightful, all of it. I’m excited to see Apple let its freak flag fly a little, and there’s no place I’d rather be than in the splash zone.

If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.