Early iPhone Duo reviews are examining how Apple’s first foldable handles everyday tasks ahead of its October 23 launch. Reviewers describe an appealing inner display alongside adjustments involving one-handed use, authentication, and app layouts, providing a practical picture of where the design works well and where it asks users to adapt.

Evaluations published October 21 offer a more substantial picture than brief demonstrations, ahead of initial retail availability on OctobeIn a September 19 hands-on, Android Central’s Harish Jonnalagadda also highlighted the inner display’s coating. Those earlier impressions provide context for the October reviews, but came from a shorter session rather than extended everyday use.r 23. The emerging story combines an appealing inner display with practical questions about handling, applications, and the compromises involved in carrying one device that serves two roles.

The Matte Display Changes the Experience

The inner screen’s finish is becoming one of the most consistent points of interest. Apple’s official announcement describes a nano-textured polymer cover intended to reduce glare and minimize the visibility of the fold.

In his PetaPixel review, Jaron Schneider praises the reduction in reflections and says fingerprints are much less noticeable during normal use. He also acknowledges that people who dislike matte displays may not appreciate this one.

In a September 19 hands-on, Android Central’s Harish Jonnalagadda also highlighted the inner display’s coating. Those earlier impressions provide context for the October reviews, but came from a shorter session rather than extended everyday use.

That gives the comparison with existing foldables a more useful starting point than screen size alone. A larger panel matters less if reflections repeatedly interfere with what someone wants to see. Equally, a finish that one reader finds comfortable may disappoint someone who prefers the appearance of glossy glass.

The relevant difference is therefore partly experiential. Shoppers should examine text, photographs, and dark scenes under several lighting conditions rather than judging the screen from a promotional image.

A Folding Phone Still Has to Work Closed

Schneider’s assessment also exposes a practical tension: he finds the hardware exceptionally well made, yet describes difficulty with one-handed typing and adjusting his grip for Touch ID. His experience favors using both hands.

Those observations should remain attributed to the reviewer. Hand size, preferred grip, and familiarity can produce different reactions to the same device.

Nevertheless, they identify something worth testing before choosing a foldable. The closed phone will still handle quick messages, authentication, and tasks performed while standing or moving. Those interactions deserve as much attention as the impressive moment when the inner screen opens.

A useful demonstration would involve composing a message, reaching frequently used controls, unlocking the device, and then opening it to continue working. Comfort across that sequence reveals more than holding an unfolded phone briefly for a photograph.

Software Makes the Comparison More Complicated

Mark Spoonauer’s October 21 Tom’s Guide review praises the ease of using two applications together, but finds that applications without appropriate optimization can look poor. He also reports that rotating into portrait interrupts the side-by-side layout, which returns when the phone rotates back.

In that specific comparison, he notes that Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 keeps two narrow app windows visible in portrait.

This illustrates why “supports multitasking” is only the beginning of a useful comparison. What happens when the phone rotates, when someone switches tasks, or when an application encounters an unfamiliar shape can determine whether the extra space feels productive.

The Duo’s Split View limitations become more relevant when they interrupt a task already underway. The review describes a change in layout rather than the loss of the app pair, which returns when the device rotates back to landscape.

Buyers should check the applications they rely on most. A polished demonstration using selected software cannot establish that every banking app, editing tool, or work service will make equally effective use of the display.

Battery Testing Adds a Measured Reference Point

Tom’s Guide recorded 13 hours and 20 minutes in its web-browsing battery test, using the larger display, a 5G connection, and brightness set to 150 nits. The publication says it adapted the test to fill the Duo’s screen and ran it alongside the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and iPhone 18 Pro Max.

In that simultaneous comparison, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 lasted 10 hours and 6 minutes, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max reached 17 hours and 31 minutes. The Samsung phone had previously recorded 12 hours and 19 minutes, illustrating why results from different runs need context rather than being treated as fixed rankings.

The result provides a useful reference, rather than a promise about every owner’s day. It also demonstrates why a single competitive headline can oversimplify testing: the method, screen used, and comparison conditions belong alongside the number.

The Strongest Differences Are Practical

These accounts suggest that the Duo’s identity depends on how its screen finish, physical format, and software work together. They also reveal disagreement about whether those benefits outweigh the adjustments. Praise for construction does not automatically resolve concerns about grip or application behavior.

For prospective buyers, the useful question is which compromises fit their routine. Reading comfort, dependable access to work applications, and easy one-handed interactions may carry different weight for different people. The first reviews now provide concrete experiences to investigate, while long-term display and hinge durability still require longer observation.

The post Early iPhone Duo Reviews Highlight Display Strengths and Everyday Trade-Offs appeared first on AppleMagazine.

Tom Rhys Harries shines as Matt Hagan in a DC Studios film that's surprisingly comfortable in its own skin.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but with a friendly user interface, great remote, and below-average price, it doesn’t have to.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but with a friendly user interface, great remote, and below-average price, it doesn’t have to.

Apple made an astonishingly good first foldable. Now iOS and third-party apps need time to catch up.

Apple made an astonishingly good first foldable. Now iOS and third-party apps need time to catch up.

Carrie White, the telekinetic prom queen from hell, is one of the most beloved horror icons in popular culture. First introduced in Stephen King's 1974 novel, Carrie, the character was immortalized in director Brian De Palma's 1976 adaptation, widely regarded as one of the best horror films of all time. It's certainly one of the best King adaptations. So Mike Flanagan faced a massive challenge when he signed on to create an eight-episode miniseries for Prime Video based on the book, released just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of de Palma's film.

I was among the skeptics who questioned why a Carrie miniseries was even necessary, although as a diehard Flanagan fan ("Flana-fan"?), I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. If anyone has an affinity for smartly adapting horror in general, and King's work in particular, it's Flanagan. And you know what? With one (very big) exception, Flanagan pulls it off, giving us a richly textured version of the story that is as much about kindness and lost innocence as bloody, vengeful rage—although we get plenty of the latter, too.

(Many spoilers below for the novel and the 1976 film, but there are no major reveals for the new series until after the second gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

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© Prime VIdeo

Late Friday, OpenAI updated the ChatGPT app on iOS and iPadOS with a new widget for your Dot and Shortcuts actions that let you control it three ways. The implementation is really well done and adds automation options worth considering.

First of all, the Dot widget is about as simple as it gets, but also very useful. I have the ChatGPT app set up to drop me into its Codex view because that’s typically how I use the app. I open Codex, check on a long-running project, and provide whatever input is necessary to keep things moving.

The problem I’ve run into is that I’ve been using my Dot, Puck, more and more to kick off research, ask one-off questions and check in on things like my email. Landing in Codex means tapping around more, which I can avoid now with ChatGPT’s new small-sized widget. The widget has two modes. The first simply shows your Dot’s avatar, and tapping on it opens your Dot’s message thread. However, if you edit the Dot, you can toggle on the “Show shortcut button” to display messaging and voice buttons beneath your Dot, adding the option to start a voice call with your Dot. As simple as this is, it’s been great to have the option to start in Codex via the ChatGPT app or check in with my Dot thread using the widget.

The other interesting feature is a trio of Shortcuts actions to message, dictate, or call your Dot. Each action has two parameters: the name of your Dot and how you want to communicate with it. That first parameter is an interesting one because tapping on it opens a list with your sole Dot in it because currently, you can only have one Dot. However, it also strongly suggests that the ability to set up multiple Dots is on the horizon, which OpenAI clearly telegraphed during its DevDay. After all, why have a parameter that opens a list unless there’s more than one choice?

The actions can be used in your shortcuts, are accessible from Spotlight Search, and most interestingly can be tied to an iPhone’s Action button, allowing you to visit your Dot’s thread in any of three ways. I’ve set my Action button up to start a Dot call. I often think of tasks and have ideas for research topics when I’m out for a walk, and I want to see if having brief calls with my Dot is an effective way to get a jump on those ideas, so they’re waiting for me in ChatGPT when I get home.

These actions and widgets are an excellent addition to OpenAI’s app and a cut above Anthropic’s more barebones approach to widgets and Shortcuts. I would, however, like to see Dots integrated even deeper into Shortcuts. The Shortcuts actions only open your Dot thread in one of the three modes. I’d love to be able to connect Dots to other apps with actions that accept input from other sources and produce outputs that can be used in other actions.

While I’m making requests, I still think multiple Dots need to be supported sooner rather than later, and OpenAI needs to provide a better mechanism for switching between Macs if you use a Dot with multiple computers. Plus, Dots are still a little buggy, with scheduled tasks failing too often and for reasons that aren’t always clear.

That said, the latest update is worth checking out if you’ve found Dots helpful. The strength of Dots is that they’re everywhere you can access ChatGPT, and now with widgets and Shortcuts actions, getting to your Dot in each of those places is easier than ever.

Over the past week, the laptop Microsoft sent me has been summarizing books and movies, generating images from my imagination, and running a 70-billion-parameter AI model that would be a stretch to fit on most laptops. It also played AAA games at a speed and fidelity I would have thought impossible on an ARM system just a year ago. Microsoft wants to sell you one computer for all of your needs, and for once that doesn't feel like total marketing fluff. Mostly.

Microsoft is throwing both arms around the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform with the Surface Laptop Ultra—and setting its sights on the would-be MacBook Pro buyer, or as the company called it, "a high performance audience." The bet is that rather than a gaming desktop for fun and a development laptop for work, buyers will pay more for one machine that does both.

The Surface Laptop Ultra arrives at a strange time in personal computing. Recent industry numbers showed a 20 percent drop in total PC shipments year over year in the third quarter of 2026. That's not just consumer purchasing either—that's across the board. Between the RAMpocalypse that has exploded consumer prices and an industry fixated on enterprise money, there hasn't been much new hardware to excite PC enthusiasts.

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Android was designed for phones, but that hasn't stopped Google from trying to adapt the OS and its apps to larger machines over the years. Googlebooks are just the latest attempt after tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables induced little change in how people interact with Android software. These new Android-powered laptops are designed to pick up where the web-focused ChromeOS left off, offering premium hardware and native support for Android apps.

Google sees Googlebooks as an alternative to Windows and macOS, but these platforms are entrenched with decades of software and UI conventions that keep users locked in. Googlebooks have to offer something very special to steal users away from either of the dominant operating systems.

For devoted Android phone users, there are some cool things in Googlebook OS, but the Android roots of these machines are impossible to miss. Sometimes it feels like using a Chromebook, and sometimes it feels like using a giant phone. It almost never feels like using a premium laptop, and that's the problem.

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© Ryan Whitwam

With the new iPhone Duo available on the 22nd and the iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max midway last month, it breaks from the pattern of recent iPhone events where the entire year’s lineup is announced all at once. The iPhone Air and 17 are awaiting a refresh, rumored to arrive sometime in Spring 2027 […]

The post iPhone Air 1 year later: Why I’m waiting for iPhone Air 2 appeared first on Low End Mac.

We have another collection our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. Today, we’re highlighting: Haven, Structured, Capture, Scrappy, and Fin.

Se você rolou pelos feeds das principais redes sociais na manhã de hoje, percebeu que já começaram a pintar os primeiros reviews do iPhone Duo, cujo lançamento ocorrerá nesta sexta-feira (23/10).

Horas antes de o embargo cair, contudo, uma série de vídeos de unboxing e hands-on começaram a pipocar internet afora, nos dando uma chance de conferir o mais novo smartphone da Apple um pouco mais de perto.

Um dos veículos a divulgar vídeos do iPhone Duo foi o canal do YouTube Kingmi Mobile, que publicou não só um, mas dois vídeos de unboxing — um para o modelo na cor branco-estrela (star white) e outro para a versão na cor céu noturno (night sky):

Em um terceiro vídeo, o canal mostra elementos como o vinco e a câmera interna sob a tela do iPhone Duo com mais detalhes:

O dobrável também aparece em outros vídeos publicados em redes sociais como o X:

Primeiros reviews

Como dito, o embargo estabelecido pela Apple para a publicação de vídeos a respeito do iPhone Duo caiu às 9h da manhã, e as primeiras impressões acerca do dobrável já estão pipocando na internet.

Entre os criadores de conteúdo que puderam colocar as mãos no dobrável antecipadamente, estão os YouTubers Marques “MKBHD” Brownlee e Matti Haapoja, bem como a jornalista Joanna Stern (ex-Wall Street Journal) e o site The Verge:

Como era de se esperar em se tratando de um smartphone de primeira geração, as opiniões sobre o aparelho até agora têm sido um tanto mistas, embora elas tendam a pender para um lado mais favorável — o que indica que a Apple acertou na execução, ainda que haja espaço para melhorias.

Um dos aspectos mais elogiados do iPhone Duo até agora é, sem dúvida, a sua tela interna com o acabamento nano-texture, que torna a utilização do aparelho em ambientes externos muito mais confortável se comparado a outros dobráveis no mercado, os quais costumam vir com displays mais reflexivos. Essa vantagem, porém, tem como custo um pouco menos de definição na imagem, mas nada que atrapalhe a experiência.

Esse acabamento também ajuda a esconder o vinco, que ainda é perceptível a olho nu, mas raramente atrapalha o usuário ao realizar uma tarefa — inclusive ao digitar, já que o iOS divide o teclado em dois para afastar as teclas do vinco caso o usuário resolva escrever algo com o dobrável entreaberto.

A área maior da tela interna também abre espaço para outro recurso muito elogiado do iPhone Duo: o modo de tela dividida (Split View), que expande consideravelmente as possibilidades em matéria de multitarefa. A impossibilidade de abrir um terceiro app lado a lado, no entanto, tem sido citada como um ponto negativo do software.

O formato de passaporte do aparelho também contribui para essa experiência, além de facilitar o consumo de mídias como vídeos e filmes. Ele, no entanto, pode tornar difícil alcançar certos elementos da interface na tela externa com apenas uma mão, além de favorecer o uso com a mão direita no modo fechado.

Em termos de câmera, as opiniões têm sido bastante mornas — algo que era esperado, considerando o espaço limitado para as lentes. Sem controles profissionais, a câmera principal do iPhone Duo lembra bastante a única lente do iPhone 17e, que, apesar de não ser um smartphone topo-de-linha, já é capaz de capturar imagens muito competentes.

Talvez a área mais controversa do iPhone Duo seja o seu software, mas não por culpa da Apple, que parece ter feito um ótimo trabalho para tornar tudo suave e extremamente intuitivo, sendo a já clássica animação de abertura/fechamento do aparelho um símbolo disso. Apps de terceiros, no entanto, ainda sofrem com os vários formatos de tela do aparelho, o que tem resultado, na maioria dos casos, em bordas pretas e imagens esticadas — problemas que provavelmente serão consertados com o tempo, via atualizações de software.

Outro aspecto do iPhone Duo que virou alvo de muita especulação nos últimos meses foi a sua dobradiça, que parece já ter assumido o seu posto como uma das mais robustas do mercado. Stern, por exemplo, colocou o aparelho para abrir e fechar mais de 32.000 vezes com a ajuda de um robô; mesmo assim, ela não conseguiu notar uma diferença significativa na resistência da dobradiça.

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Em pré-venda desde a última sexta-feira (16/10), o iPhone Duo já aparece com prazos de entrega extremamente elásticos em vários países, incluindo o Brasil, como comentamos aqui.

Vendido por US$2.000 nos Estados Unidos, o dobrável sai pela bagatela de R$22.000 no mercado nacional — isso em sua versão de entrada, com 256GB de capacidade.

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  I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time lately looking at AIO/GEO/AI visibility trackers. We’ve been trying to figure out…

YouBot may look like another AI crawler jamming up your logs. Dig into where You.com’s search infrastructure is actually available,…

When I make my yearly trip to Denver, I always bring my road bike. It's my annual chance to suffer on the kinds of gradients unavailable in the glacier-scoured lands of northeastern Illinois. In advance of this year's trip, Specialized hooked me up with its new gravel bike, the Diverge 4 Pro, so I brought it with me to challenge it in ways not possible on the fastidiously groomed gravel trails of suburban Chicago.

In contrast to the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 we reviewed a couple of years ago, the Diverge 4 Pro is strictly human-powered. Specialized calls it "the ultimate getaway vehicle," designed with input from off-road adventure riders, scientists, and racers. It's marketed as the only gravel bike you need for racing, adventure, and distance rides. While I can't speak to its racing performance, I can say the Diverge 4 Pro is a blast on any kind of gravel and does well enough on the road.

Priced at $8,249, the Diverge 4 Pro is designed for rough trails and technical descents, both of which unfolded below me at the summit of an is-it-gravel-or-is-it-single-track climb in Douglas County, Colorado. I took a deep breath, and down I went. The descent was rutted and slightly more technical than anything I'll ever run into around Chicago, but I had enough time on the bike to realize that if I had trouble on the descent, it wouldn't be the bike's fault.

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Last week, Apple announced an iPhone unlike any it has made in the past. An iPhone that has seemingly already led several other phone manufacturers to pursue entirely different designs for their flagship products. A remarkably distinct device with the kind of "I can't believe they did that" software touches that Apple sometimes pulls off when it's at the top of its game.

That phone is not the iPhone 18 Pro.

The 18 Pro and Pro Max are in the unusual position of being the second-most interesting iPhones that Apple is launching this year. The foldable iPhone Duo stole the show at Apple's launch event, but it's not arriving until next month. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Fun camera features help make these candy bar iPhones stand out from the dazzle of the folding iPhone Duo.

Fun camera features help make these candy bar iPhones stand out from the dazzle of the folding iPhone Duo.

This is a new documentary film that had its world premiere at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival, held September 4-7. The director of this film, Nanette Burstein, is well known for her other biopics, including one featuring Hillary Clinton. This Carl Sagan film is roughly half about Sagan’s professional career and half about his personal […]