Apple’s first foldable competes well with the Z Fold 8, at least in terms of specs.
Apple’s just-announced iPhone Duo represents perhaps its most radical reinvention of the smartphone. While Samsung is now in its eighth generation of foldable phones and other competitors have multiple generations in their own foldable lines, the iPhone Duo is Apple’s first device with a screen that closes.
Samsung, which makes parts for the iPhone and made this foldable screen, beat the Cupertino colossus by launching the Galaxy Z Fold 8 last month, in August. While the Z Fold series is traditionally a tall, thin device that opens to a nearly square screen, the Z Fold 8 is rather short and stocky, adopting a profile called “passport style.” (The larger candy bar style didn’t disappear, but was renamed the Z Fold 8 Ultra to justify a price increase.) This is not coincidentally the same form factor that Apple chose for its first foldable phone, meaning the two devices are positioned in the market as direct competitors.
Samsung seems to have struck gold with the Galaxy Z Fold 8, its passport-style foldable. Yesterday, Samsung announced that the phone and its big brother, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, outperformed last year’s Fold 7 by 30% in the first month of their respective lifecycles. Of course, the iPhone Duo should be a heavy hitter and could make Samsung’s numbers look quite cute once the dust settles. It contains a stacked spec sheet that is clearly aimed at Samsung.
If you’ve decided that this is the year you’ll finally bend over for a foldable, chances are these will be the two smartphones you’ll be fighting between. So here’s how the two compare in all the areas that matter. While we need time to test the iPhone Duo before rendering a final verdict, we’ve taken its spec sheet side-by-side with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 to see how the two compare.
There’s no clear winner between these dual screens
The chunky and slim Fold 8 has an interior display that folds out to 7.6 inches with a resolution of 2,448 x 1,848 pixels; it runs at 120 Hz. Apple chose the same 7.6-inch screen size with a slightly higher resolution of 1,878 x 2,670, also at 120 Hz. Samsung’s outer display is 5.5 inches, while Apple’s is 5.4 inches and again has a slightly higher resolution.
Samsung made the foldable OLED displays for the iPhone Duo, and we can expect it to reserve some goodies for its own products. In Woozad’s Fold 8 review, we raved about the anti-glare coating on both screens, which makes it much easier to use the phone in direct sunlight or bright overhead lighting. Surprisingly, this feature has made its way to the iPhone Duo. Apple may call it a “nano-textured finish,” but it does the same thing. Apple claims its interior display has 40% greater rigidity than other materials used in the industry. The latest foldables from Samsung and Apple are also reinforced with a titanium plate under the folding layers.
Performance and cameras: the iPhone takes the advantage
The Fold 8 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, built on a 3nm process. While it’s extremely competitive with Apple’s last-generation A19 Pro silicon, the A20 Pro chip found in the iPhone Duo is built on a 2nm process and edges out Qualcomm’s best mobile chip in terms of productivity and gaming tasks. Apple had 50% more memory bandwidth and a 40% faster GPU on the A20 Pro compared to the A19 Pro. You can expect Qualcomm to release the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in the near future, but it won’t appear in new Android phones until later this year, and it will likely appear in next year’s Galaxy phones. As for RAM, the Galaxy comes with 12GB, unless you opt for the top-end 1TB storage model, in which case you’ll get 16GB. Apple hasn’t revealed how much RAM the iPhone Duo has. However, Apple is known for its well-optimized software and iOS has more aggressive RAM management than Samsung does on Android.
Neither Apple nor Samsung have equipped their passport-style foldable devices with serious camera firepower of the kind found in their slab-style flagship phones. Both devices do without a telephoto module, which means anyone who likes to take long-distance zoom photos should think twice before picking up either phone. However, the cameras offered differ. While Samsung sticks two 50-megapixel cameras on the Fold 8, one wide and one ultra-wide. Apple has equipped the iPhone Duo with a 48-megapixel wide and ultra-wide camera.
Selfie cameras are a different story. Samsung’s foldable middle child has two 10-megapixel front-facing cameras, with the cover screen camera using a 24mm wide lens and the inner screen camera adopting an 18mm ultra-wide. The logic seems to be that you can fit more content onto a larger screen and therefore need a camera that can fit more into its frame. The iPhone Duo has a 12 MP cover camera and an under-screen camera whose specifications Apple has not revealed; this one appears to be intended only for use during FaceTime calls. Ultimately, the iPhone will probably take very iPhone photos, for better or worse.
Batteries, biometrics and multitasking: Samsung takes the lead
With a larger screen when unfolded, you’d expect a bigger battery to power it, but neither foldable follows that logic. The Fold 8 packs a 4,800 mAh cell with a maximum wired charging speed of 45W and only 20W wireless, even with a Qi2 compatible case for magnetic charging. The iPhone Duo has no listed battery capacity, with Apple only announcing that it will last for 31 hours of video playback on the interior display, or 44 hours on the exterior. It will charge at least 25W on MagSafe.
Interestingly, the iPhone Duo carries a blast from Apple’s past in the form of a fingerprint sensor mounted in the power button. This is the same solution that Samsung implements on its own foldables. In both cases, the placement is due to the constraints of a foldable form factor. There’s no room for Apple’s FaceID system in the iPhone Duo, nor for Samsung’s ultrasonic under-screen fingerprint sensor on the Fold 8. iPhone users who have become accustomed to FaceID may find this jarring, but we’ll need hands-on testing to determine which fingerprint reader works best.
Apple has equipped the iPhone Duo with sleek multitasking features, but Samsung has been perfecting the multitasking capabilities of its Android One UI skin for many years. Indeed, Apple has not done as much in this area with iOS 27 on the iPhone Duo. It can run two applications side by side, resizing and reorienting the layout. You can even save a pair of apps to open side-by-side later, a feature straight from Samsung.
Samsung devices, including the Fold 8, can run three apps side-by-side, with several more open simultaneously in windowed mode, up to five apps total in the latest One Ui software. You can drag photos and files from Samsung’s Gallery and My Files apps to browsers or text fields in other apps, keep open apps hidden to the side of the screen for quick access, or collapse them into bubbles. You can even get a desktop-like environment with better mouse and keyboard support by plugging the Fold 8 into an external monitor.
Durability and Price: The iPhone can take a beating, but can your wallet?
Durability is always a concern with foldable phones, and while they’ve come a long way in this regard, they’re still more destructible than normal slab-style phones. The Fold 8 has an IP48 dust and water resistance rating, which means you can take it out in the rain but not to the beach. The iPhone Duo outperforms Samsung here, with an IP68 rating which, combined with titanium construction, makes the iPhone a much better choice in terms of durability, at least on paper.
Finally, we have to talk about price. Both of these phones come with a hefty price tag, especially considering how fragile they are compared to their panel-based counterparts. The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999 for the base 256GB configuration and goes up to $3,199 for the high-end 2TB version. Samsung prices the Fold 8 at $1,900 for the entry-level 256GB model and prices top out at $2,500 for 1TB with additional RAM. Thus, the Galaxy is slightly cheaper, which helps offset its less efficient processor.
Verdict: Apple has a real crowd-pleaser on its hands
When looking at both the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the iPhone Duo, the iPhone clearly takes the win in terms of projected performance. While we need hands-on testing to confirm our suspicions, we do know that its A20 Pro chip performs significantly better than the A19 which was already neck and neck with the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor. Apple excels at optimizing its software for its own silicon, so expect that to give the iPhone an even greater advantage. However, the iPhone’s stacked spec sheet comes at a higher cost.
Elsewhere, the comparison comes down to personal choice. If you’re an expert multitasker, you might not get what you need from the iPhone’s relatively modest software options, but if you don’t want to treat your phone like a fragile baby bird, the iPhone can handle a little more physical punishment. What Apple did was create a foldable for iPhone users, with all the familiar trappings of iOS, and give it just enough of a competitive edge to lure the curious customer away from Samsung. While the Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 and 8 Ultra will likely remain the foldable devices of choice for enthusiasts, Apple has a real crowd pleaser on its hands.
