// THE VERGE — MOBILE & WEB
Our best tips for using the iPhone Duo
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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.
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.
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.
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.