Apple’s $2,000 folding phone is a surprisingly good stand-in for a $20 notebook.
Believe me; nothing gets me going quite like a new notebook. This one will be different, I think. This time, I really will take it everywhere. Inspiration can strike at any moment, and you have to be ready, says David Sedaris in that one MasterClass I watched on a flight. With this one special new notebook, I will see the world differently. I’ll steal moments for myself to write, rather than pulling out my phone to scroll at every opportunity like a trained monkey. And a few weeks, a month, or maybe a year later, I’ll concede that it didn’t change everything and add it to my notebook graveyard. At least they all look nice on the corner of my desk?
The iPhone Duo is not a notebook — although it is the first iPhone to support the Apple Pencil. Even so, I can see the new notebook effect in the eyes of the people I talk to about the Duo. “Is that the new iPhone?” the conversation starts. I hand over the phone and give them the short version of our 26-minute review: It’s nice, it’s kind of heavy and chunky, you should wait for the second generation. They nod, but I can tell they still want one anyway. They’re tired of their big/aging/boring phone, they tell me. And this one would be different.
It’s hard to argue against. It really is a different phone. Its new form factor lets you actually use it in meaningfully different ways. The Duo can act like a vintage Hasselblad with a waist-level viewfinder. It can be a book-shaped e-reader. And with this week’s iOS 27.2 update officially adding that Apple Pencil support, it can also be a notebook.
Notebooks are nice and help you express creativity. Phones are bad attention-stealing machines, or something.
That’s the USB-C Apple Pencil, to be specific, so there’s no pressure sensitivity. You do still get the ability to “scribble” handwriting that’s automatically turned into text in apps like Messages or Safari, as you can on the iPad. But even with the basic stylus, there’s a lot of fun to be had doodling and writing notes out by hand. I asked for some Pencil-friendly app suggestions and downloaded a handful. I used the native Notes app to scribble down some article ideas. I set my five-year-old loose on a blank note, to his delight (the phone survived the encounter, too). But having the stylus in my hand led me on an unexpected side quest: turning the whole phone into a notebook.
Why not? It’s notebook-shaped. Notebooks are nice and help you express creativity. Phones are bad attention-stealing machines, or something. Maybe I could cajole the Duo into being something less distracting, more input-friendly. I put together a minimalist home and lockscreen designed around this theory. I won’t lie, it’s pretty nice. But I don’t think I curated my way out of the new-notebook trap, even if it was a fun exercise.
There aren’t many apps ready to take advantage of the new stylus support. Notes, unsurprisingly, is where the Pencil is at its best. When you use the Pencil for handwriting in the app, you can enable the auto-refine handwriting feature that neatens up your writing while still keeping its unique characteristics intact. This has been available on the iPad since 2024, and it’s particularly useful on the Duo’s comparatively small screens.
It occasionally gets tripped up by some of my scrawl that it either doesn’t know what to do with or misinterprets — it kept insisting on turning a “u” into an “o” in one instance. And it works after a small delay when you pause your writing, which I can see being distracting if I really want to get into a flow state. But it’s a nice middle ground between my untidy scribbles and full handwriting-to-text conversion and very handy for something like a grocery list.
The Notes app also has a big homescreen widget that kind of turned the phone into a notebook, but wasn’t nice to look at. After some more digging, I found almost exactly what I’d been looking for: TypeDraw.
It’s a $4.99 one-time purchase, and it’s optimized for the Duo. When you launch the app, it turns the cover screen into the front of your notebook. To flip to a page, you can either swipe on the cover screen or open the whole phone. It’s a delight.
TypeDraw isn’t really for power note-takers the way other apps like Bear are. You can’t add tags or links between notes, and you’re limited to one notebook. But it automatically creates a table of contents at the beginning based on the headings of your notes, so you can skip right to the section you’re looking for. Plus, if you drag your finger along the “elastic” on the cover, it’ll stretch and snap back, complete with satisfying haptics. I have zero regrets about the five bucks I spent on this app.
Using the Apple Pencil with the Duo gave me one more reason to love the matte finish on the inner screen. There’s just a bit of resistance moving the pencil across the display that feels more satisfying than the lifeless plastic-on-glass effect of writing on the cover screen. It’s not going to feel like using a Remarkable tablet or anything, but it’s nice.
The Pencil has one other neat trick — it can stick to the Duo’s hinge magnetically when the phone is closed. The pencil is longer than the phone, so it’s an awkward fit, but it’s been a handy way to carry both around the house as I relocate throughout the day.
I was only, like, 60 percent serious when I set out to turn the Duo into a notebook, but I actually liked the idea the more I got into it. Reimagining my homescreen around creating rather than consuming feels like a worthwhile cause, and I’m planning to live with it for a while to see if it inspires any changes in my phone habits. To that end, I also set up a shortcut to launch TypeDraw whenever I open the inner screen.
But I think the most useful part of this exercise was examining, once again, how much stuff I really need on my homescreen. I can get most things done with a Spotlight Search or a tap in the Control Center. Siri is much more helpful now too, and it’s always lurking nearby to help out. The grid of apps I’m so used to is mostly for emotional support at this point. I didn’t need a folding phone to learn that, but it helped.
Above all, the new-notebook effect proved to be just as strong as always. The shiny new thing eventually fades into the background. You certainly don’t need a $2,000 phone to reevaluate your homescreen. You can — and I will continue to — just carry a little notebook around with your regular phone. A fun new gadget is delightful, don’t get me wrong. But don’t hang all your hopes and dreams for a new you on one of them.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge