Tim Pan at MediaStorm built a folding rig and ran an iPhone Duo through 10,000 folds at room temperature, then another 1,000 at -4°F (-20°C). The hinge came out as smooth as it was on day one, but the crease got deeper. HTX Studio ran its own version of the test and measured the crease growing from 48 microns to 167 after 3,000 folds.
In these reviews, we see that the crease is deeper, but when they’re touching the screen and using the phone normally, it barely shows. Early owners on Reddit have said much the same.
So the crease is a problem you see when you go looking for it.
Most of the other changes the reviewer describes are ones you can’t avoid. You can type with the phone open, closed, sideways or half-folded. Open it mid-call and it switches to speakerphone, because there’s no earpiece on the inside. The NFC antenna is awkwardly positioned, so tapping through a subway gate with the phone unfolded looks ridiculous. People with smaller hands have to stretch to use the wider outer screen one-handed.
All this to say, Duo will change some of your phone-use habits. That’s the part of the review a folding machine can’t test, and I’d argue it’s the part that matters more.
Your phone habits live in your hands
Wendy Wood, a Professor Emerita of Psychology and Business at USC has spent much of her career showing that habits get triggered by cues in our surroundings, often with little input from what we want in the moment.
Her best-known demonstration involves stale popcorn. With David Neal and colleagues, Wood handed moviegoers buckets of either fresh popcorn or week-old popcorn. People who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies ate much less of the stale stuff. People with a strong movie-popcorn habit ate about the same amount whether it was fresh or stale. When the researchers moved the test to a meeting room, a place nobody associates with popcorn, even the habitual eaters left the stale batch alone.
The team ran the theatre study again and asked some people to eat with their non-dominant hand. That small change was enough to break the pattern. Eating with the “wrong” hand made people pay attention, and once they paid attention, they noticed the popcorn was bad and ate less of it, including those with strong habits.
For close to two decades, the phone in our hands has been the same basic slab. The grip, the thumb reach, where the keyboard sits, lifting the phone to your ear. All of it has had years to become automatic and a firmly entrenched habit. A phone that changes shape and behaves differently depending on how far you’ve opened it, puts its owner in the position of the left-handed popcorn eater. My psychologist prediction is that in the first weeks with a Duo, owners will be more aware of what they’re doing with their phones, and they won’t like some of what they notice.
The window doesn’t stay open
Researchers call this the habit discontinuity hypothesis. When the context around a habit changes, the habit loosens, and people become more open to doing things differently. In a field experiment with about 800 households, they have found that an intervention promoting sustainable behaviour worked better for people who had recently moved house.
A new phone is a much smaller disruption than a new home, but the logic carries over. If the Duo loosens your phone habits, the loosening is temporary. New habits form around the new shape, and the extra awareness fades with them. That makes the first few weeks with a new phone the easiest time to change how you use it. If there’s a phone habit you’ve been meaning to drop, like reaching for it the moment you wake up, set the new phone up to make that harder before your old reflexes rebuild around it. Wait a few months and you’re back into your well-worn phone use behaviors.
The fold as a ritual
There’s a second thing going on with the Duo that interests me more, partly because it’s what I study. The reviewer’s favorite use for the phone is reading comics and novels. He says pulling it out of his pocket and opening it like a book makes him enjoy the reading itself more, and he admits this probably sounds silly when tablets and e-readers exist.
It doesn’t sound silly to me. It’s a ritual. In one set of studies, people who followed a set sequence of steps to unwrap and eat a chocolate bar rated it more flavourful, savoured it more and would pay more for it than people who ate it however they liked. Random gestures didn’t produce the effect. Doing the ritual yourself worked better than watching someone else do it, and a short delay between the ritual and the first bite made the effect stronger. The researchers traced it to involvement. In other words, the ritual drew people into the experience.
Unfolding a phone to read fits most of that. The movement is the same every time, you do it yourself, and it comes right before the thing you want to enjoy, with a short pause built in.
Fold 10,000
Here’s where the two ideas run into each other. Ritual works through involvement, through paying attention to what you’re doing. Habit is what a behaviour becomes once you no longer need to pay attention to it. Repeat the unfolding enough times and it stops feeling like opening a book. It becomes one more automatic motion, as unnoticed as the crease.
If you want to maintain the ritual, my research shows, you need the action to stay firmly within your conscious awareness. – Inc./Tribune News Service
