LG Wing hands-on: A new kind of dual-screen

In the past few weeks we’ve seen a number of devices with strange and wonderful new form factors. We’ve seen more traditional foldable devices like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2, a new two-screen experiment in the form of the Microsoft Surface Duo, and now LG comes in with a phone that physically rotates to reveal a second display.

This is the LG Wing.

Wait, do you pan how?

The LG Wing can physically rotate its display 90 degrees, resulting in a landscape-oriented display on top with a smaller square display below. The top display is much thinner than the back half of the phone, which houses all of the components, and offers just enough space for the curved control panel. The upper control panel is a 6.8-inch OLED with a resolution of 2,460 x 1,080 and the lower display is a 3.9-inch OLED with a resolution of 1,240 x 1,080.

LG has created a special interface for the two displays when the phone is opened. When you fold out the main screen, it becomes a carousel of apps for you to choose from. You can change which apps are on this display and which are below, and you can open apps on each display individually. LG also added the option to launch two apps at the same time, with one app shown on the lower display and one on the upper display. Due to the form factor of these ads, only about half of the apps I downloaded work on the lower ad. That being said, this is still not final software and more apps may work in the production version of the phone.

In the examples above, I set the phone to start both YouTube and Chrome, as well as Spotify and Google Maps, at the same time. This works similarly to the Surface Duo with two apps, where apps keep their position when you close and then reopen the phone.

If you’re a passenger or delivery driver, I could see the LG Wing come in extremely useful for long driving sessions. I’ve seen many Uber drivers have separate apps for navigation and music or phone calls, and the LG Wing can do both at the same time. Pretty nifty.

Some apps, such as YouTube, also have dedicated navigation interfaces when viewing content in landscape mode. This allows you to immerse yourself in the primary content and make adjustments like brightness or track positioning without breaking the main display. It’s not life changing, but it’s a cool feature that makes it a little more interesting to use. It also shows that LG has put a lot of thought into how people will use the device.

LG has also developed some special camera modes that take advantage of the phone’s unique form factor. There are two wide-angle cameras on the LG Wing: a landscape and a portrait camera. This allows the wing to record landscape video while it is open. LG noticed that it felt like holding a gimbal like the DJI OM 4 and added special software to make the phone work like one. In the example above, you can pan the joystick and use different modes, e.g. B. a horizontal lock that makes the phone feel like a real gimbal. To do this, the phone switches on the sensor to enable digital panning in addition to electronic image stabilization.

There are probably several other ways you can take advantage of this unique form factor and we are still finding new use cases as we play around with the device. Stick with the full review where we’ll explore these use cases in more depth.

Does it feel like a normal phone?

When closed, the phone is just a bit thicker than the average smartphone. It’s 10.9mm thick compared to 8.1mm on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. That extra space is required for the hinge mechanism to work properly, but honestly it doesn’t feel unwieldy. When opened, the bottom half is about as thick as a device you would see today. So you just add the thickness in the form of that extra display at the top.

Below is a USB-C port and speaker. On the right side there is a power switch and volume rockers. The SIM card and microSD compartment are on the left. There is a pop-up selfie camera at the top. The speaker sounded pretty thin on my device, but again this is a pre-production model so we need to see if the production model of the device is better.

The LG Wing has three cameras on the back. The rear sensors include a 64-megapixel primary camera, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide camera, and a second 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera that is used for gimbal mode in videos. The second sensor is rotated 90 degrees to maintain the orientation in landscape orientation while using gimbal mode as you are still holding the phone in portrait orientation. The pop-up selfie camera offers 32 MP.

All in all, before you fold it out, the LG Wing seems like a pretty standard LG phone. But you might be sad to see that LG doesn’t have a headphone jack in this model. The company made a point of reassuring us that this is a one-time deal, and the lack of a jack on this device doesn’t affect whether it integrates with other phones.

Technical specifications

LG Wing: The full review will follow shortly

The LG Wing is an interesting addition to the selection of really weird devices we’ve got our hands on recently. The categories for foldable and dual screen devices are growing fast and it’s great to see more companies envision how we’ll interact with different form factors in the future.

LG hasn’t announced full pricing or availability for the Wing yet, but it was mentioned that it would cost around $ 1,000 and would come to Verizon first, followed by AT&T and T-Mobile.

Our full review of the LG Wing is coming very soon, so stay tuned!