LG WING Aurora Gray Android 10.0 Smartphone

Product Information

The bottom screen often turns into a keyboard, and it can be a little narrow. I wasn't tremendously accurate typing on it, but I think I just need a little more practice. Switch to swivel mode, though, and the 6.8-inch OLED main screen swivels out sideways, and up to a horizontal orientation at the top of the phone, exposing the smaller 3.9-inch OLED mini display underneath. In Gimbal mode, the phone captures up to 1080P video—that's 2.1 megapixels. Think of the 12-megapixel sensor as divided into six 2-megapixel rectangles, and your field of vision as a moving 2.1-megapixel window onto that larger panorama. With a real gimbal, you're moving your camera around. With this, you're just moving a virtual window onto an extremely wide-angle fixed field of view. But the LG Wing 5G has a far more dynamic design than today’s smartphones, one that will likely draw eyes whenever it’s swiveled open. Even if it’s eventually priced out of reach for the typical consumer, whoever makes the leap will have something no competitor can touch: true novelty.

LG | Argos LG | Argos

Swiveling the phone open is one thing; using it is another. Granted, you can’t use every app on the mini-screen, and it’s a bit onerous to get apps loaded on the big screen at all. But when you can make use of both at once, it makes other phones feel decidedly old-fashioned. Ergonomics isn't everything, but it's a lot. The swiveling LG Wing has the most standard "phone" form factor of this year's crop of amazing, expanding phones, giving you a dual-screen experience without feeling too chunky, wide, or weird in your hand. The Wing is coming to all three major carriers later this year, but I got a few hours with a pre-release model to get a view on what to look forward to. A Totally New Design The LG Wing 5G is indeed 5G capable, both in sub-6 and mmWave for US versions sold through Verizon. Even if users get tired of the swivel mechanic, they’ll still have a respectable phone that covers most of the bases. 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). There are countless fun possibilities here, like having a Google Meet call going on the secondary panel while playing a game on the main screen. LG has even worked with app partners like Gameloft to bring extra functionality to Asphalt 9 when played on the Wing, like a map view while racing.And there are weird bugs, of course. When you expect a link from an app on the big screen to open on the small screen, that doesn't happen...but sometimes if you then open Chrome on the small screen manually, it loads to where the link should have gone. The Wing's software has been thoroughly customized to take advantage of its unusual form factor. When you swivel the top screen open, it switches from displaying the Android home interface to offering a carousel of dual screen–friendly apps: Asphalt 9, the gallery, the camera, YouTube, and Maps. There's no immediately obvious way to look at any other app on the main screen while it's horizontal. However, if you open an app while the screen is in portrait orientation and then rotate the screen, the app will stay open (sometimes adjusting well to the change of orientation, sometimes ending up displayed sideways). That mini-display works just like a full-size one: you can use apps on it (though in a slightly more cramped interface), use it for secondary controls as in the camera app, or dedicate the whole space to a keyboard. You can technically open any app on the small screen, though you'll have to deliberately toggle the apps that aren't specced for it in a special menu screen (when swiveled open, swipe up on the app tray and tap the three vertical dots, then tap 'Second Screen apps'). Open out the LG Wing when the camera app is open, and you'll enter Gimbal mode. This isn't a mechanical gimbal-like Vivo's Apex 2020 handset, but an electronic gimbal built upon the second ultrawide camera. The idea is you can comfortably hold the camera in your hand and pan around using controls on the secondary display.

LG Wing Accessories - Mobile Fun LG Wing Accessories - Mobile Fun

The main shooter goes toe-to-toe with some of the best Android cameras out there, with impressive dynamic range and color clarity, plus minimal noise even in darker conditions. LG's newly improved night mod helps out here too, allowing for computational long exposures. As is typical for many LG cameras, a decent amount of sharpening is applied to photos from the Wing's main camera, but unlike the Velvet, this doesn't result in artifacting or other unpleasant visual effects, even when digitally zooming beyond 2X. For everyday use, this is an excellent smartphone camera.

Middling Connectivity

See 5G compatible phones from United Kingdom See 4G compatible phones from United Kingdom O2 Market The aforementioned Rolodex home screen when using the Wing in a T-shaped configuration also seems like a waste of space, letting you see fewer apps for no good reason. And, infuriatingly, apps need to be manually whitelisted to be able to show on the secondary display. If an app isn't whitelisted, it won't show up on the second screen's app drawer, and you'll need to dig deep into the settings and do a lot of scrolling to manually tag it.