LG WING Aurora Gray Android 10.0 Smartphone

Product Information

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'). Thus, you'll have to learn some workflows (manually setting up app pairs) to actually use the extra screen to its current potential. When you do, it's neat, though you'll still yearn for a more fluid interface, more apps supporting the smaller screen, and more novel applications.

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

You shouldn't expect to see 2Gbps speeds on the Wing; 800Mbps will be more like it. The Wing uses a Qualcomm X52 modem, which we've previously seen run into trouble with AT&T's network (see our LG Velvet review). The X52 doesn't have a problem with Verizon 4G, but where flagship X55 phones will see peak speeds on Verizon's the 5G network, phones with the X52 modem will only use half of Verizon's millimeter-wave spectrum and see slower speeds. (To be fair, that difference will only show up in near-ideal circumstances in a limited number of cities.) 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. The LG Wing 5G works just fine without the display swiveled out. 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. The 6.8-inch OLED main display is still plenty of real estate to do any kind of task you’d perform on a traditional smartphone. 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 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. 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 5G review | TechRadar

While the Wing in its current form may be a non-starter, I'm still glad LG is trying unique ideas like this. And I'm hoping that the recent rumors suggesting the demise of the LG Rollable are unfounded, as this phone seems likely to be a much more compelling overall product. (Though possibly quite a bit more expensive, too.) The result: I don't think we're going to see many games that use the second screen, or third-party camera apps that build on LG's innovative control scheme. LG has announced a few software partners—Rave, Tubi, Ficto, and Naver (which is big in Korea)—but they aren't companies well-known in the US. 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.

In other words, the format has a lot of potential; in practice, the one-and-a-half screens take some time to use effectively, because the software isn't quite intuitive yet. LG got the basics down of transitioning between swivel modes, but loading up apps on either screen is convoluted. A successor might make it as easy as swiping an app from one screen to the next, but not the LG Wing 5G. 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. 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.