Anyone walking down the street in the ’90s would not have been surprised to see a passerby toggling between a couple of pagers at once, and maybe retrieving an early flip phone or a Discman from a Kate Spade purse.
But after years of progressive slimming down and merging of our electronics into single devices that do everything, clunky seems to be back. The screens are bigger, the headphones are more obtrusive and, crucially, there are two or even three phones on hand.
On a recent afternoon, Rachel Behar, 37, an event planner from Brooklyn, clutched a double-decker of iPhones in one hand while rushing through the 14th Street and Eighth Avenue subway station. “Most days, when I’m running around like you saw me, I have both,” she said. “Because I’m life on one, mom of two, work on the other — and they all need me all the time.”
It may seem counterintuitive, but many people who carry two cellphones believe it’s the healthier choice. Having one for business and one for everything else allows for clearer boundaries between work and life. “At the end of the day, if you’re not a doctor and you’re not saving lives, I think that you should shut off from work every once in a while,” Behar said.
According to a survey by Vorhaus Advisors, a research and consulting firm that specializes in media, the number of people in the United States who reported owning two smartphones increased to 18 percent in 2025 from 15 percent in 2024.
Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, said there had been a collapse between personal and work life in the pandemic years, leading to a growing need for compartmentalization that has manifested, in part, with the second phone.
“This is both good for employees, for work-life balance, but also the way in which it protects the employer from seeing all kinds of things about your personal life they don’t want to,” said Galperin. Using one device for everything “came with a series of privacy and security trade-offs,” she said. Corporations benefit from having employees work “on phones and devices that their I.T. department and their security department can try to keep safe and secure because they control them.”
This isn’t a brand-new phenomenon. In the 2015 hit “2 Phones” by Kevin Gates, the rapper sings about having multiple cellphones to keep areas of his life separate. “I got two phones, one for the plug and one for the load,” he sings. “I got two phones,” one for women “and one for the dough. Think I need two more.” (In a 2024 interview, he clarified that the song was actually about having six phones, not two.)
The poly phone life comes with the inconvenience of having to actually carry them. Everyone handles it a bit differently.
There are the stackers. “That’s omnipresent,” said Kevin O’Leary, an investor on “Shark Tank,” referring to his three phones with reading glasses on top, which he arranges in a neat pile in front of him if he’s, say, out at a restaurant. “It doesn’t look that onerous, you know, it’s just sitting there.”
Does he find carrying three phones bulky? “No,” he said. “I also travel with three laptops and an iPad.”
Then there are the pocket stuffers. Cole Van Gelder, 28, an associate at a real estate investment firm, had both of his phones on a table at Chelsea Market, where he and his mother were having lunch. When he’s on the move, he slips them into the pockets of his Lululemon chinos. “I usually have this one in my right pocket and this one in my left pocket,” Van Gelder said, gesturing to each phone.
Rockie Cedeno, 38, was walking down Church Street in Lower Manhattan, holding one cellphone in his hand while the outline of a second was visible in the front pouch of his hoodie.
For him, pants are off-limits when it comes to phone storage. “I don’t like it anywhere in my lower pockets,” Cedeno said, gesturing below his waist. Why? “Radiation.” (According to scientists, there is no proof that the type of radiation emitted from cellphones is dangerous.)
Multi-phone use can create opportunities for peacocking. Choudhary Muhammad Kamran, 47, an entrepreneur with businesses in Dubai, New York, Singapore and Pakistan, stood in front of an office building while holding two phones and a battery bank, fanned out like playing cards in one hand. He insisted that it was comfortable. (Don’t try it at home.)
“I’ve identified many problems that using a phone can cause,” Dr. Nick Maroldi, a certified hand therapist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in White Plains, N.Y., said in an interview. Having two cellphones, Maroldi said, “increases the risk for faulty mechanics, bad ergonomics. And I think it overemphasizes some of our overuse patterns.” The most common conditions he sees from cellphone overuse are tendinitis, trigger fingers and carpal tunnel syndrome.
Hands-free accessories, like a cross-body strap that attaches directly to one’s phone case, may help with organization and diminish the need to grip. But they’ve been met with mixed reviews.
Vanessa Friedman, the fashion director at The New York Times, where some employees have second phones, wrote in a message: “This is just a fancier version of the clip-on pager, and it is fooling no one.”
Jeff Amrhein, 55, of Portland, Ore., has been selling handmade leather goods through his Etsy store since 2011. His best seller, which he first introduced in 2013, is a double cellphone case fashioned from Italian, vegetable-tanned cowhide that protects the phones from getting scratched or shmutzy. He has sold nearly 3,000 to date.
“So many people have reached out to me personally after getting their case and just saying, like, ‘Wow, this makes my life so much easier,’” Amrhein said in an interview.
For the hyper-efficient, having more than one cellphone can feel like the closest thing to cloning oneself.
O’Leary aspires to be on two phones simultaneously, in two separate meetings, each broadcast into a different ear by two earpieces. (He swears by the Starkey, a sophisticated Bluetooth listening device that, when tucked into the ear, is almost invisible.) In fact, an earpiece was dictating incoming text messages to O’Leary while we talked.
“That’s how we work on a laptop,” O’Leary said. “You’ve got the spreadsheet open, you’ve got the word processor open, you’ve go the text messages open and you’re just moving between them. Why not do that with your phones? You can, it’s not that hard.”
Gabriella Gershenson is a reporter contributing to the Styles section.
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