LG WING Aurora Gray Android 10.0 Smartphone

Product Information

Like its close sibling the LG Velvet, the Wing includes an in-screen fingerprint sensor (in the primary display) as your go-to biometric unlock method. Like much of the LG Wing overall, the software gimbal mode seems like a good idea that hasn't yet matured into a complete thought.

Hands On With the LG Wing: The Most Useful Dual - PCMag UK

Truth be told, we were popping the phone open as much as we could, but the handset works just fine in its natural (unopened) state. But with the Wing, the second screen is always there, right under your thumb, demanding to be used, and easy to reach. As with the Dual Screen on the LG V60 and LG G8X, the software for multi-screen use works fine, but it's not terribly intuitive, and you won't find all the functionality you’d expect. These aren’t too hard to differentiate when the phone is closed, but when the screen is swiveled open, all three are located behind the display, and awkward to press. LG has done a better job matching the colors of the two displays than, for example, some of its older Dual Screen offerings.There’s a USB-C port on the bottom, with the phone’s single speaker to the right of it; on top are a microphone and the pop-up front-facing camera. That results in more detailed images, but with a greater risk of blur if you don't hold the camera still. That said, the 60Hz display sips power, and as such, I never had trouble getting through a full day on a single charge.

LG Wing review: An imperfect dual-screen experience LG Wing review: An imperfect dual-screen experience

If, say, your brain is scrambled by the current state of the world and you can't focus on anything, the Wing will make it way too possible for you to scroll Twitter while at the same time watching "Homecoming," as I did this morning. Even if users get tired of the swivel mechanic, they’ll still have a respectable phone that covers most of the bases. Thankfully, a recent update has made juggling apps between the two displays a little easier — similar to LG's Dual Screen accessory, you can transfer apps between the two panels with a three-fingered swipe. A successor might make it as easy as swiping an app from one screen to the next, but not the LG Wing 5G.

The aforementioned front-facing camera is 32MP and pops up from the top of the phone, and in a first for LG, you can use a Dual Recording mode to flip back and forth between selfie and rear cameras while recording – or have both going at once and pick where the picture-in-picture inset video is. The big screen then defaults to a carousel of apps designed for the dual-screen experience, although you can run pretty much any app on either screen. Sure, it doesn’t have a telephoto lens like most other phones on the market (let alone the Samsung Galaxy S20’s 30x ‘Space Zoom’), nor the sheer volume of screen real estate that the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 has (effectively three phone displays’ worth). but sometimes if you then open Chrome on the small screen manually, it loads to where the link should have gone. This isn't a mechanical gimbal-like Vivo's Apex 2020 handset, but an electronic gimbal built upon the second ultrawide camera.

72 hours with the LG Wing 5G: what it’s like to use a swivel

As for the Wing itself, the core experience remains much the same as at launch, with the device still running firmware based on Android 10. That's flanked by two ultrawide cameras — a "regular" ultrawide for photography, and a gimbal-mode ultrawide for use with LG's new video features.

The Wing's ambitious form factor looks destined to fall to the ecosystem pitfall that a lot of innovative phones have run into over the past several years. The LG Wing 5G has a very particular way of harnessing its extra screen, and it's not terribly intuitive. You may like it more or less than other flagship cameras, but I think that comes out to a matter of taste. But the design is also ideal for looking at something on the top screen and making notes on the bottom screen, or having a map open on the top screen and looking up the names of businesses in Chrome on the bottom screen. Unfortunately for everyone, attempts to promote innovative APIs by other OEMs have universally failed.