Our best tips for using the iPhone Duo

The Duo is an entirely new kind of iPhone, so it comes with a bit of a learning curve. That’s a wild thing to imagine, since the iPhone has had very few fundamental changes since its inception. But the Duo is built different. If you won the preorder lottery and managed to get your hands on one today, you’ll see what that means. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll lose track of the volume buttons as you turn the thing around.

We’ve learned a few tricks over the past week of flipping and folding the Duo as much as we could. Here are our favorite tips and hacks for newly minted Duo owners.

You can set orientation lock on each screen independently

I learned this one when someone on Threads asked about it. Normally, I keep screen orientation lock enabled because I hate it when everything flips unintentionally. But the Duo is built to be used in different orientations. So, throughout my first week with the phone, I just left it unlocked and didn’t think twice about it. But it turns out that if you lock orientation on the outer screen to preserve your sanity, you can leave it unlocked for the inner screen, which you are much more likely to want to rotate. And even with orientation locked on the cover screen, videos will still rotate automatically if you prop it up in tent mode.

You can automatically remap the volume buttons to match orientation

The iPhone Duo is a phone that you sometimes end up using upside down. It happened to us a lot; you flip open the screen, and for some reason it feels natural to rotate the screen clockwise. But this orients the volume controls so that the bottom button turns the volume up and the top one turns it down. You can change this setting. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Fixed Position Volume Controls and toggle it off. Now, when you rotate the inner screen clockwise, you’ll press the top button to increase the volume. Why isn’t this the default behavior? Great question.

You can tap the Wi-Fi status icon to bring up Control Center

Now that Apple has three shortcuts mapped to swipes from the top of the iPhone screen — swipe from the top left for notifications, the middle for Siri, and the top right for Control Center — it’s easy to miss whatever you were going for on the first try. All three shortcuts appear on the Duo as well, but there’s another way to pull up the Control Center — just tap the new, unified Wi-Fi / battery status icon. This will fully reveal the Control Center and expand the status icon into its independent parts. It’s a small thing, but anything that makes the phone easier to use one-handed is welcome in my book.

You should register a bunch of fingers with Touch ID

You might be tempted to speed through setup and just register one finger for Touch ID, but it’s worth doing a few more while you’re at it. Once again, the Duo is a phone you’re going to flip around and reorient by its nature. So while your right-hand thumb makes sense for unlocking the cover screen, it requires an awkward maneuver to use that finger once you’ve opened the phone and rotated it. Your left-hand index finger will be closer to the Touch ID sensor if you rotate the phone counterclockwise the way Apple CEO John Ternus seemingly intended. And it sounds silly, but enrolling your right-hand pinky is a good move for those occasions when you turn the inner screen clockwise.

You can watch a video and open an app below it in portrait orientation, but it’s complicated

The iPhone Duo very much only wants you to multitask with two apps side by side in landscape mode using the inner screen. There’s no window resizing, no additional apps. And if you turn the phone to portrait orientation, one of those apps flies away and you’re down to one. But there is technically a way to get two apps going in this orientation — it’s just wonky.

Start playing a video in an app like Prime Video, then tap the picture-in-picture (PiP) icon to move it to a PiP window. Swipe away to get to the homescreen, open another app, then rotate the phone to portrait. An icon to stack the video on top of the open app will appear in the PiP window.

You might want a PopSocket

I picked up a PopSocket habit while using the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and it makes a tremendous difference when you’re holding such a heavy phone for a long time. It’s especially appealing on the Pro Fold and the Duo because they both have magnets built into the back panel. You can thwack it onto the phone when you want it and just take it off when you don’t. The MagSafe PopSocket I’ve been using with the Duo has been more than strong enough to support the phone’s weight.

If you’re picking up a Duo today and discover a neat trick as you use your new phone, drop it in the comments below. We’re all learning together here.