Here’s iPhone Duo: Apple missed its chance to do what Samsung couldn’t

Apple announced its first-ever foldable phone last week. The iPhone Duo will officially launch on 23 October, with pre-orders beginning on 16 October. It’ll start at £1,999/$1,999 for 256GB of storage.

Terrible name aside, it’ll likely set the terms for the foldable market for the foreseeable future. That’s the Apple effect.

Regardless of its almost inevitable success (although its likely sky-high pricing could have an effect), I feel that Apple has missed a trick here.

The iPhone Duo will feature support for the Apple Pencil (USB-C version) on both outer and inner screens. But I think that’s a half-way measure that highlights where Apple could have trumped Samsung at the first time of asking.

A tentative first mover

Samsung has been in the foldable game from the beginning. It pretty much wrote the foldable book with its Fold series, which reached its eighth and best iteration recently with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8.

However, one thing it has seemed weirdly unwilling – or perhaps unable – to do is to properly implement its S Pen stylus system. And I don’t mean mere S Pen support, which the company has both added and subtracted over the years.

No, I mean the sort of deep-seated stylus integration that has come to define the company’s flagship non-foldable phone series, most recently in the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra.

I’m not even a serious stylus user. I don’t tend to use Samsung phones in my day-to-day life; I’m not particularly artistic; and if I want to jot down notes the old-fashioned way, I tend to do it the old-fashioned way.

But I still recognise the potential power of this little implement, bolstered by the various AI and automation tools that have grown up around it. Indeed, I’ve been actively willing Samsung to take what seems to me the obvious next step, and supply its Fold series with the same internally stored S Pen system.

An engineering challenge

Stylus inputs simply make way more sense on larger screens. They’re at home on tablets, which are closer to the dimensions of the kind of physical paper sizes many of us grew up using, from portable notepads to sheets of A4 paper.

As such, an integrated stylus makes far more sense to me on a book-style foldable than it does on a regular phone. The writing and drawing experience would simply feel much less constricted than it does on the Ultra range.

Presumably the engineering cost has been too high to implement such a feature into a foldable in the past. There’s a reason early foldables suffered from poor cameras and tiny batteries – there simply wasn’t the space to do any better. Not with that awkward split design, with super-thin halves joined by an intricate hinge mechanism.

The thing is, those engineering challenges have seemingly been addressed. The advent of silicon-carbon technology, in particular, has allowed manufacturers to fit in far more space-efficient batteries.

Samsung’s reluctance to adopt this technology, following its own chequered history with batteries, is perhaps what has held it back from going all in on S Pen with its Galaxy Z Fold range.

I’m not entirely sure why the likes of Honor, Motorola, and Oppo have similarly resisted such an approach. Maybe it’s a cost thing, or maybe these companies deem the demand for such a feature too low.

Whatever the reason, it has resulted in the way being clear for Apple to hit the ground running with a killer feature after arriving so late to the foldable party. Alas, there will be no Apple Pencil Mini – and that’s a shame.

A stylus isn’t the only feature the all-new Duo is missing out on.