LG Wing (Image: LG)Is a folding phone too chunky for you? How about a swivel? The LG Wing has an unusual swiveling form factor that stacks two screens on top of each other in a T-shape, letting you do two things at once or use the bottom half of the phone as a handle for a big-screen experience.
LG has long dabbled in dual screens.
Its most recent phones—the G8X, V60 and LG Velvet—have add-on dual-screen cases that turn the phones into book-style devices.
About 30 percent of V60 buyers chose to buy it because of the dual-screen case, LG tells us.
But the company acknowledges that the dual-screen case is bulky and requires an easily lost dongle for charging.
The Wing starts out as a 6.67 x 2.93 x 0.43-inch standard slab-style phone with a 20.5:9, 6.8-inch OLED screen.
It's not all that thick, although it's heavy at 9.17 ounces.
(A lot of that is the hefty 4,000mAh battery, bigger than the ones in the Surface Duo.) Rotate the top half, and it turns into a "T" shape with a square, 3.9-inch secondary screen on the bottom.
A sort of carousel of selectable apps appears on the top screen and suggests apps that work well in this mode.
You can use the phone as a standard candybar design.
(Image: LG) There's no hinge, per se, but LG still wants to talk up its materials innovations: in this case, a "hydraulic dampener" in the rotation mechanism and "thermoplastic polyoxymethlyene" to prevent the front screen from scratching the secondary screen.
The phone has been tested for 200,000 swivels and 60,000 pop-ups of the front-facing camera.
Since the screens don't merge into one like on folding phones, they're very much about doing two things rather than about expanding a single experience.
LG did say that some apps are able to span both screens.
Examples of apps that work together on the two screens.
(Image: LG) Like the Fold and the Surface Duo, the Wing comes with multi-app shortcuts that launch two apps at once: a map on the big screen and texting on the small one, for instance, or watching video on the big screen and tweeting about it on the small one.
You can also use the big screen as a big keyboard, and the small one as a texting window, or just have the small screen go black and become a handle for the phone.
LG says the device uses Android's native dual-screen APIs, so most apps should be compatible, although some founder on the smaller screen's unusual square aspect ratio.
Still, though, it's a wild idea.
The traditional 3.5mm headphone jack, a longtime LG mainstay, is alas lost here; it's a casualty of cramming a lot of wild electronics into a small space.
LG says this choice is "specific to Wing" and it has "a product launching later this year that still retains the audio jack." Clearly, LG respects its 3.5mm lovers.
Going Pro With a Faux Gimbal
The camera situation here is as unique as the Wing's form.
The Wing has a 64-megapixel main camera and two wide-angle cameras.
There's a 13MP ultrawide, and a 12MP ultrawide that's been rotated 90 degrees.
There's also a 32MP pop-up front-facing camera.
What you don't see here is how one of the cameras is rotated 90 degrees.
(Image: LG) The trick here is that the phone lets you take photos in both vertical and horizontal mode while holding it vertically.
The rotated ultrawide camera also has a virtual gimbal system, which just appears to be some dramatic digital effects on the optically stabilized camera.
I look forward to checking it out.
Gimbal controls appear on the bottom screen while the top one is a viewfinder.
This is very interesting and very weird.
The Wing also brings back a popular niche LG feature: the ability to record video with the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same time, so you can narrate your videos.
This feature on earlier LG phones has been popular with vloggers and YouTubers, in my experience.
Is the 765 Enough?
The Wing went with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor rather than the flagship 865, along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
That's a little concerning because when we looked at the LG Velvet on AT&T, another 765G-based phone, its performance on AT&T's 5G network was downright bad because of the way AT&T configures its network.
LG said that the Wing will have millimeter-wave 5G, which the Velvet lacks, but I don't know if that will solve a problem that came down to the 765's inability to aggregate many low-band frequencies at once.
I'm less concerned about the 765's overall processor and graphics performance.
In devices I've tested, it's been fine.
The Wing will definitely test the chipset in news ways by having two screens to deal with at once, but I don't see that as an overwhelming challenge.
LG says the Wing will come to Verizon first, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile.
The companies didn't announce prices, specific dates or colors.
Hopefully, it will cost less than the $1,999 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2.
LG Wing (Image: LG)Is a folding phone too chunky for you? How about a swivel? The LG Wing has an unusual swiveling form factor that stacks two screens on top of each other in a T-shape, letting you do two things at once or use the bottom half of the phone as a handle for a big-screen experience.
LG has long dabbled in dual screens.
Its most recent phones—the G8X, V60 and LG Velvet—have add-on dual-screen cases that turn the phones into book-style devices.
About 30 percent of V60 buyers chose to buy it because of the dual-screen case, LG tells us.
But the company acknowledges that the dual-screen case is bulky and requires an easily lost dongle for charging.
The Wing starts out as a 6.67 x 2.93 x 0.43-inch standard slab-style phone with a 20.5:9, 6.8-inch OLED screen.
It's not all that thick, although it's heavy at 9.17 ounces.
(A lot of that is the hefty 4,000mAh battery, bigger than the ones in the Surface Duo.) Rotate the top half, and it turns into a "T" shape with a square, 3.9-inch secondary screen on the bottom.
A sort of carousel of selectable apps appears on the top screen and suggests apps that work well in this mode.
You can use the phone as a standard candybar design.
(Image: LG) There's no hinge, per se, but LG still wants to talk up its materials innovations: in this case, a "hydraulic dampener" in the rotation mechanism and "thermoplastic polyoxymethlyene" to prevent the front screen from scratching the secondary screen.
The phone has been tested for 200,000 swivels and 60,000 pop-ups of the front-facing camera.
Since the screens don't merge into one like on folding phones, they're very much about doing two things rather than about expanding a single experience.
LG did say that some apps are able to span both screens.
Examples of apps that work together on the two screens.
(Image: LG) Like the Fold and the Surface Duo, the Wing comes with multi-app shortcuts that launch two apps at once: a map on the big screen and texting on the small one, for instance, or watching video on the big screen and tweeting about it on the small one.
You can also use the big screen as a big keyboard, and the small one as a texting window, or just have the small screen go black and become a handle for the phone.
LG says the device uses Android's native dual-screen APIs, so most apps should be compatible, although some founder on the smaller screen's unusual square aspect ratio.
Still, though, it's a wild idea.
The traditional 3.5mm headphone jack, a longtime LG mainstay, is alas lost here; it's a casualty of cramming a lot of wild electronics into a small space.
LG says this choice is "specific to Wing" and it has "a product launching later this year that still retains the audio jack." Clearly, LG respects its 3.5mm lovers.
Going Pro With a Faux Gimbal
The camera situation here is as unique as the Wing's form.
The Wing has a 64-megapixel main camera and two wide-angle cameras.
There's a 13MP ultrawide, and a 12MP ultrawide that's been rotated 90 degrees.
There's also a 32MP pop-up front-facing camera.
What you don't see here is how one of the cameras is rotated 90 degrees.
(Image: LG) The trick here is that the phone lets you take photos in both vertical and horizontal mode while holding it vertically.
The rotated ultrawide camera also has a virtual gimbal system, which just appears to be some dramatic digital effects on the optically stabilized camera.
I look forward to checking it out.
Gimbal controls appear on the bottom screen while the top one is a viewfinder.
This is very interesting and very weird.
The Wing also brings back a popular niche LG feature: the ability to record video with the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same time, so you can narrate your videos.
This feature on earlier LG phones has been popular with vloggers and YouTubers, in my experience.
Is the 765 Enough?
The Wing went with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor rather than the flagship 865, along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
That's a little concerning because when we looked at the LG Velvet on AT&T, another 765G-based phone, its performance on AT&T's 5G network was downright bad because of the way AT&T configures its network.
LG said that the Wing will have millimeter-wave 5G, which the Velvet lacks, but I don't know if that will solve a problem that came down to the 765's inability to aggregate many low-band frequencies at once.
I'm less concerned about the 765's overall processor and graphics performance.
In devices I've tested, it's been fine.
The Wing will definitely test the chipset in news ways by having two screens to deal with at once, but I don't see that as an overwhelming challenge.
LG says the Wing will come to Verizon first, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile.
The companies didn't announce prices, specific dates or colors.
Hopefully, it will cost less than the $1,999 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2.
