Apple iPhone Duo, first foldbale iPhone, launched: Price in India, specifications and features

Apple iPhone Duo launched at Rs 2,99,900. The first foldable iPhone opens to a 7.6-inch screen and swaps Face ID for Touch ID.

Apple has launched the iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, at Rs 2,99,900 in India, arriving roughly seven years after folding phones went on sale elsewhere. Apple is calling it the most transformational change to the iPhone since the original, and it does break with a fair bit of iPhone convention: Face ID is gone, replaced by Touch ID in the side button, and there is no SIM tray or Action button either. It comes in star white and night sky, with pre-orders from October 16 and sales from October 23, a month after the iPhone 18 Pro.Shut, the Duo works like a normal phone. The 5.4-inch outer Super Retina XDR screen carries more than 90 per cent of the screen area of an iPhone 18 Pro. Open it and there is a 7.6-inch inner display, half again as large as the iPhone 18 Pro Max and the biggest Apple has put on an iPhone. Both screens share an aspect ratio, so content scales across them cleanly, and both run ProMotion and Always On at up to 3,000 nits. The inner panel gets a nano-texture finish that cuts glare and, more usefully, makes the crease harder to see.

iPhone Duo price in India and availability: Price starts at Rs 2,99,900 and pre-orders open on October 16

The Duo starts at Rs 2,99,900 and runs to four storage tiers. Pre-orders open at 5:30 pm IST on Friday, October 16, and the phone reaches Apple’s own store and select partner stores on Friday, October 23.

Apple is running the usual launch offers alongside. Trade-in credit ranges from Rs 4,500 to Rs 81,500 depending on what you hand over, there is No Cost EMI of up to six months, and instant cashback of up to Rs 7,000 on American Express, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank cards. The box holds the phone and a USB-C cable, with no adapter and no earphones. Two first-party cases are being sold separately: the Duo Folio with a retractable kickstand at Rs 14,900 and a lighter two-part case at Rs 8,900, both of which work with MagSafe and Qi2. One thing to settle before ordering is connectivity, because the Duo is eSIM-only worldwide and has no tray at all, though Airtel, Jio and Vi all support eSIM in India.It is worth holding that starting price against the rest of the range. The iPhone 18 Pro begins at Rs 1,64,900 and the iPhone 18 Pro Max above it, which puts the Duo at close to twice the cost of a Pro for a phone that carries the same chip and a smaller camera system. What the money buys is the folding screen and the software built for it, not better photography. AppleCare+ is offered as usual, and given that this is a first-generation folding device with a hinge that has to survive years of opening and closing, it is a more relevant question here than on a regular iPhone.

iPhone Duo specifications: A20 Pro chip, dual batteries and a 48MP Dual Fusion camera

The inner display is built from ten ultra-thin layers with wide-angle OLEDs, and the FaceTime camera sits under the panel so nothing interrupts the surface. Durability is where Apple has done its longest engineering pitch. Under the cover layer is a custom polymer the company says is up to 40 per cent stiffer than the industry norm, with high-strength glass above and below the folding panel and adhesives that let the layers slide against each other like pages, so the screen does not absorb the bend stress. A titanium plate runs along the base. The hinge alone uses more than a hundred parts. The frame and hinge cover are grade 5 titanium, the front carries Ceramic Shield 2 with three times the scratch resistance of the last generation, and the phone is rated IP68.Inside is the same A20 Pro as the iPhone 18 Pro, built on a 2nm process, with a 6-core CPU that is 20 per cent quicker than the A19 Pro, a 7-core GPU up 40 per cent, a dual 16-core Neural Engine and 50 per cent more memory bandwidth. A new display engine drives both screens at once. Apple claims up to 35 per cent better sustained performance than the iPhone 17 Pro, helped by a vapour chamber bonded to the chip package. A battery sits on each side and the two behave as one, giving 31 hours of video on the inner display, 44 hours on the outer, and 24 hours of typical use when both get equal work. Charging reaches 50 per cent in about 20 minutes over cable, or around 30 minutes on MagSafe. The N1 chip handles Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread, and Apple’s own C2 modem does cellular.Apple has also made a point of the phone holding whatever position you leave it in. It can be used partly folded, stood in a tent shape on its edges, or propped like a small laptop, and iOS reads the angle from sensors in each half and reorients accordingly. Speakers sit at the top and bottom with tuning that accounts for how far apart they end up in each pose. There is no Action button on the Duo, a small loss for anyone who has got used to it on recent iPhones, though Camera Control survives and now launches the new Siri mode in the camera app.The camera is the one place where the Duo is not the flagship. It uses a 48MP Dual Fusion system, a Fusion Main with sensor-shift stabilisation and a 2x optical-quality crop plus the same 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide as the iPhone 18 Pro. There is no dedicated telephoto, no variable aperture and no Pro controls, all of which stay exclusive to the Pro models, and Apple Reference Image is missing too. What the Duo gets instead are tricks the shape allows. Smart Take fires the shutter when it sees everyone posed, Duo Preview puts a live preview on the outer screen so your subject can frame themselves, Kid Cue plays animations to pull a child’s eyes to the lens, and Duo FaceTime lets someone beside you join a call on the outer display. Video goes up to 4K at 120 fps in Dolby Vision, and Photographic Styles 3 adds texture and grain controls. The front camera is a 12MP Center Stage unit, with the under-display FaceTime camera shooting 1080p.

iPhone Duo software: iOS 27 rebuilt around two screens, with Siri AI in beta

The Duo ships with iOS 27.1, and the interface has been reworked rather than stretched. Lock Screen controls, the dock and app navigation shift to the side to free up vertical space, the Dynamic Island is redesigned to run vertically along the edge of either display, and opening the phone brings up two Home Screen pages with a scrolling Today View on the left. Content reorients as the phone folds, turns or flips over.The multitasking is the part that will decide whether the extra screen earns its money. Split View puts two apps side by side on an iPhone for the first time, you can open two windows of the same app, and app pairs can be saved and reopened together. StandBy now works on either display even when the phone is not charging, turning it into a clock, photo frame or widget panel in tent mode. Netflix, Zoom and Slack have already adapted their apps, and Apple Pencil support arrives later this year on both screens.Beyond the assistant, Apple Intelligence brings the photo tools that arrived with iOS 27 across the range: Spatial Reframing to recompose a shot after the fact, Extend to widen it, and a Clean Up tool that can now remove larger objects. Safari can watch a page and alert you when a price drops or something restocks, and Call Context surfaces a booking code from your mail when you ring an airline. Some of these lean on Apple’s servers and carry daily usage limits. Anyone moving over from Android can use the Move to iOS app to bring across photos, messages, contacts and calendars.Siri AI, the rebuilt assistant Apple showed at WWDC, is rolling out in beta with iOS 27 from Monday, September 14, in English first, with more languages in October. It pulls personal context from messages, mail and photos, takes actions inside apps and answers general questions, and Apple is pitching the large inner screen as the best place to hold that conversation.

iPhone Duo specifications at a glance