Likewise, the 32-megapixel popup camera performs adequately across the board, with moderate skin-smoothing effects and an almost 80-degree viewing angle that's just about wide enough to fit in a couple of extra people. 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'). 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, by its very nature, doesn't really have any direct competitors — nobody else is trying to make an Android phone with swively screen. So instead we're left looking for rivals in the broader dual-screen and sub-flagship Android phone space. LG has made some compromises to keep costs low enough for it to reach a price tier comparable to most top-tier smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 and the iPhone 12 Pro. Compared to those phones, the LG Wing 5G gives up photo capabilities (like any optical zoom) for its extra screen real estate. You can count those deficiencies on one hand, though: the LG Wing 5G has respectable specs and an admirable main display, making it competitive even without its swivel functionality. LG Wing 5G price and release date

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

Otherwise, the phone's specs work just fine, switching from online browsing to watching media to intense gaming without a hitch. The phone isn't let down by its less-than-top-tier chipset and RAM pairing. For the most part, if you've seen the software of the LG Velvet or V60 ThinQ, you'll be right at home on the LG Wing. Not a whole lot has changed. The Wing's single bottom-firing speaker is also nothing special, producing slightly tinnier output compared to rivals with a dual-speaker system.

Here's the magic: Push the screen to the left and it smoothly flips up in a T-shape. The push suggests that the phone is meant to be held in your right hand, although when the screen is flipped up, the fingerprint sensor is in a place only lefties can love. Swiveling the screen up switches the top display to a carousel of apps, which are sadly limited to a handful of apps, although some have extra functionality with the small screen. We haven’t yet found out how to add to this list, and the only way we found to use a different app on the main screen is to set up dual-app combo shortcuts, which you can do in Settings > Display > Swivel Home > Multi-Screen Shortcut (phew).

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

The Wing runs Android 10, which is a year old at this point. It will get an upgrade to Android 11, but LG is notoriously slow to provide OS updates, so you’ll have to wait for your carrier to push it. Upgrades beyond Android 11 are unlikely. The top screen shows a carousel of dual-screen-compatible apps. As you might have guessed, rotating the screen to the top of the phone does shift the weight to the top half of the device – not enough to make it ungainly, but you'll be more comfortable keeping it in two hands. And yes, you can pretty easily take care of simple tasks on the mini-screen: at 3.9 inches, it’s nowhere near today’s smartphones, but at just a hair smaller in area than the iPhone 5’s 4-inch display, it has enough space for a compact Google search window or to text with a full keyboard. Writing more than a couple paragraphs on the mini-screen gets a bit annoying, but mostly due to the form factor, given the phone is slightly top-heavy when swiveled open. It's been four months since the LG Wing first launched, and in recent months there has been plenty of speculation around the future of LG's mobile division. Recent reports even cast doubt on the future of the promising LG Rollable. 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. LG's update roadmap suggests an update to Android 11 might not arrive before the middle of the year, just a few short months before Android 12 is finalized.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. The Wing's Qualcomm 765G chipset benchmarks below where I'd expect. I didn't see any problems in video calling, web browsing, or movie watching, even while multitasking on two screens, but high-performance games that aren't optimized for the device may have issues. The included game, Asphalt 9: Legends, was fine; it's designed for the phone. In the extremely high-test but popular open-world adventure game Genshin Impact, occasional stutters somewhat marred the gameplay experience. The game Asphalt 9 uses the second screen for a mini-map. Much of the multi-screen experience is smooth, and the transitions when swiveling the main screen open and closed are pretty seamless. But as mentioned before, there’s some logical interface controls that would make loading up apps on the two screens – and switching between them – much easier.