Tech
No, the iPhone Duo isn’t a small phone
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Published 10/23/2026 5:00:00 AM
No, the iPhone Duo isn’t a small phone
This isn’t the iPhone Mini successor we’ve been dreaming of.
This isn’t the iPhone Mini successor we’ve been dreaming of.
When we published our review of the iPhone Duo, I got a lot of hopeful questions from my fellow Mini fans who took note of the cover screen’s Mini-ish 5.4-inch size. “Is this… a small phone that turns into a tablet?” they asked. And I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no. The Duo is not the small phone we’ve been looking for.
I wish it was. I like a small phone. I own an iPhone 13 Mini that I refuse to surrender, even though it barely lasts a full day.
But the Duo is thick and heavy. You will feel its weight every time you read an email, scroll Instagram, or put it in your pocket. It is a dense phone, and after a week with the Duo, my 13 Mini feels almost comically light. Like, can this be a real phone? Surely not.
The Duo’s front panel is also quite a bit wider than the 13 Mini — 84.1mm compared to 64.2mm — which makes it much harder to reach your thumb all the way across like you can with the Mini. The Duo tries to compensate for this by putting controls on the right side, which helps a bit. As reported by Wired, Apple is also planning to add its reachability feature to the Duo later this year to help out in those moments. But inevitably there’s something I need to tap that’s out of one-handed reach on the Duo, and the illusion of using a small phone is gone. On the other hand, you get a much larger onscreen keyboard with the Duo; the Mini’s feels cramped by comparison.
It comes down to this: Liking a small phone isn’t the same thing as liking a small screen. Sure, all things being equal, a big screen is nicer for a lot of stuff. But I’ll put up with a tiny screen to enjoy the benefits of a phone so small I can forget it’s in my pocket. It’s a tradeoff. The iPhone Duo offers a different set of tradeoffs. Put up with the small screen on the outside, and you’ll be rewarded with a really big screen whenever you need it. And that small screen is attached to a big, heavy phone.
This sounds like I hated using the Duo, but I didn’t. I just had to calibrate my expectations. I think you’ll be disappointed by the Duo if you expect a small phone that expands into an iPad Mini. But if you go in expecting a small-screen experience you can tolerate in order to get a much bigger screen whenever you want, you’ll have the right idea about the Duo.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
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