Apple's new foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, has drawn a mostly favorable reception from users in the weeks since it reached customers, according to David Pierce's Installer newsletter for The Verge. Pierce, The Verge's editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host, said the feedback in his inbox runs roughly 80 percent positive, 5 percent negative and 15 percent deeply confused about the device's interface choices. He also said readers have asked which apps work best on the Duo and how to set the phone up.
Pierce does not own a Duo, so he asked The Verge's Allison Johnson, who coauthored the outlet's review of the device, to describe her setup. Johnson said she first tried keeping only a few apps, such as Headspace and NYT Games, on her homescreen to match an aspirational minimalist look, but called the experiment a miserable failure because having to search for Messages frustrated her. She restored a row of essential apps at the bottom of the screen and added a large calendar widget, which she said improved the experience considerably.
Johnson's app lineup includes NYT Games, Kindle, Headspace, Spotify, Google Maps, Safari, Messages and Mail, along with a color gradient wallpaper from iOS that she chose for a minimalist effect. She keeps a large widget and shortcut for TypeDraw, an app she said makes the Duo behave like a physical notebook and works well with the Apple Pencil. She also placed a large weather widget on the left panel of the homescreen and a shortcut to the built-in iOS lo-fi playlists, which she recommended to anyone who gets overstimulated and wants instrumental music to focus.
Johnson said she removed the dock entirely during her minimalist experiment and is content without it, adding that she may never return to using a dock. The newsletter also passed along recommendations from Installer readers. One reader, Marcus, said that on the Duo's outer display Safari reserves a side column for its buttons and pages stop short of it, and that a Safari extension called Widen lets pages run underneath the column to gain roughly 25 percent more page while keeping text clear of the buttons.
Other reader picks included Search, a WebKit-based browser from a small Parisian design studio that one reader described as a lightweight, classy European counterpart to Arc with Chrome extension support on Mac. Readers also recommended Monarch for budgeting, the Dungeon Crawler Carl audiobook series, a YouTube project in which Brenpoly open-sourced an Apple Vision Pro built for $5, the Laika film Wildwood, the $59 one-time-purchase browser Brave Origin and the King's Field-like game Queen's Domain. The newsletter also covered a space history performance, new apps for writers and podcast listeners, and a podcast about Wikipedia.
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