iPhone Duo
Having not held the iPhone Duo myself yet, my first impression after watching a bunch of hands-on videos, is that this device is going to be big. It will be popular and is clearly on track to sell out instantly come October 16th. So, figuratively it will be big. But in the physical sense, I think it’s going to get bigger. That is, I expect Apple will follow quite quickly with an even larger-screened model.
For current iPhone and iPhone Pro owners, the Duo is a straight win, featuring an expansive inner screen in a pocketable form factor. But for current iPhone Pro Max owners, I wonder if the first-generation Duo’s size will be somewhat unsatisfying. The Duo has a significantly smaller outer screen and a larger-but-not-that-much-larger inner screen than what Max users are accustomed to. The difference between the Duo’s battery life and the Max is also meaningfully greater than that of the standard Pro phone, as another compounding factor for this segment of the market to consider. A future iPhone Duo Max could address those customers better with larger screens and longer battery life, and it feels like an inevitability to me.
All that being said, there are enough people to capture with the first-generation model that I am convinced Apple is on to a winner here. I do not think it will suffer from fourth iPhone syndrome, like the Air, Plus, and mini incarnations before it. Within a few years, I can see the Duo selling at a level that rivals the performance of the other mainline iPhone models.