LG WING Aurora Gray Android 10.0 Smartphone

Product Information

There are four companies with enough market share to drive third-party app and accessory development. They are Apple, Google, and, to a lesser extent, Huawei and Samsung. Even Samsung hasn't done that well at it; the only success I can think of is Samsung making sure creative apps are compatible with its S Pen. Unfortunately for everyone, attempts to promote innovative APIs by other OEMs have universally failed. We saw this with the dual-screen Kyocera Echo and ZTE Axon M, and with Asus's convertible phone-tablets. The second 12MP 120-degree FoV f/2.2 ultra-wide camera is specifically used for a video mode that uses the swivel functionality. Once you've flipped up the main screen, you can use Gimbal Mode to simulate shooting with a gimbal device, using controls on the mini display to move the camera. While there feels like a lot of image stabilization at play, this feels like the footage is cropped from a larger picture captured by the ultra-wide lens.

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

A new 'hexa motion sensor' stabilizes shots and allows digital approximation of following a subject and panning the screen. We haven’t gotten to try this out too much, but we’re excited to simply have some variety with phone photography – even if it’s just moving the controls down to the mini screen to free up an uninterrupted viewfinder on the main display. 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.

Performance That Doesn't Really Take Flight

But for most of us, the dual-screen feature doesn't offer enough functionality to justify the high price tag. And when it comes to standard single-screen usage, rivals like the OnePlus Nord and Galaxy S20 FE offer much much more for much less. 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. A neat Dual Recording video mode lets you capture videos with the front and rear cameras at the same time—great for YouTubers. The videos can be saved as two files or one. A whole bunch of phones a few years ago had this feature, but it's been less common in the past two years.

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

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. 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 was announced on September 14 and its release date was on October 15 in the US, though it's unclear when it will come to other regions. In that same upside-down configuration, LG's keyboard even allows you to swipe outwards for a more ergonomic, split keyboard arrangement. (That said, using the Wing in anything other than the "closed" or "T-shaped" configurations isn't the most comfortable experience.) 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.This essentially increases the display real estate by half again, and you could be forgiven for thinking at this point that the smaller screen isn’t too helpful. However, while not all apps will fit and work on it,having this dedicated area for secondary apps and tasks is useful in theory; imagine being able to to fire off a text, or Google the odd fact, without having to switch away from the show or stream you’re watching or the game you’re playing. 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. 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.

LG Wing 5G review | TechRadar

This is especially the case if you do any typing, which is likely what you’ll be using the small screen for much of the time. Your hands may get a little cramped if you're really leaning in to the bottom-screen typing experience, as your reviewer found after typing this whole section on the small display. But it works – and we dig the flexibility it potentially offers. A "dual recording" mode records video with the front and rear cameras at the same time, perfect for letting you narrate something you're seeing. There's an option to record it as two video files, so you put them together during your own editing process, or as one, so you can share them immediately. Dual recording is great for YouTubers In T-shape, the phone is nicely balanced. Whether I was cradling it along its length or gripping the bottom screen as a handle, it didn't feel like it was about to fall out of my hand. 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. Look at that Wing swing!Using the LG Wing 5G effectively boils down to knowing when to swivel. You won't need to open it all the time, as the 6.8-inch main display works just fine for regular tasks, especially while on the go. Yes, you can use it one-handed while swiveled open, but it's cumbersome. Wi-Fi reception was about on par with the iPhone 12 Pro and behind the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. Using an attenuated signal from a 100Mbps source connection, I saw around 8Mbps on both the LG Wing and the 12 Pro, and 35–40Mbps on the Note 20 Ultra. The iPhone 12 mini, on the other hand, frequently dropped that attenuated connection.