In her week-long hands-on with Apple’s first foldable iPhone, Joanna Stern puts the $2,000 iPhone Duo through extreme testing—including building a custom robot to fold it more than 32,000 times. The result is a frank look at a beautiful, surprisingly durable piece of hardware that adds genuine flexibility (and fun) to the iPhone, while also revealing the bugs, first-generation compromises, and software rough edges that still need work.
Joanna Stern for New Things:
Apple’s first folding phone is a beautiful, surprisingly durable piece of hardware. It brings a degree of flexibility to the iPhone that we’ve never seen before. Its matte folding screen is impressive, especially outdoors. It makes taking photos genuinely fun and turns a phone into a tablet, an alarm clock, a tiny laptop and other configurations depending on how you position it.
It’s also buggy, occasionally maddening and full of first-generation compromises…
For the past seven days and nights, I’ve been testing the crap out of the Duo. Yes, nights. With the help of a hardware designer and prototyper, we built a folding phone robot that worked all night to test the hinge.
The Duo is one of the most exciting — and frustrating — iPhones I’ve tested in years. It’s a glimpse of where the iPhone might go next for everyone…
For four nights, I put the Duo to bed in Hingey, a little folding machine that brilliant hardware designer and prototyping wizard Aron Cohen built using a servo motor and 3D-printed parts. At 17 folds per minute, it racked up 8,160 folds while I slept for eight hours. After four nights? 32,640 folds.
There was no noticeable deterioration. At Cohen’s workshop we even measured the force required to open the hinge before and after using a calibrated push-pull gauge. Surprisingly, the hinge was actually a little stiffer after all that folding. In everyday use, it felt pretty much the same as on Day 1. Insanely impressive.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s tons more in Stern’s full iPhone Duo review – highly recommended – here.
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