LG’s new swiveling Wing phone is perfect for your multitasking, attention-deficit life.
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Hi, I’m Sascha Segan from pcmag.com, Here with the amazing, swiveling LG Wing. The LG Wing is the wildest
concept in smartphones I’ve seen this year, And this has been a year Of a lot of wild smartphone concepts. As you can see, it starts out
looking like a regular phone, And then you swivel up the screen And you have a main screen
and a secondary screen That can operate independently
or, ideally, together. It’s really cool, It really helps you do two
things at once with your phone, And I’m going to give you
a closer look at right now. So, the key thing that initially
makes the Wing different From other folding phones Is how much it just feels
like a regular smartphone In your hand when it’s in
its regular smartphone mode. I’m holding it right now And yeah, it feels like a big phone, But it doesn’t feel much wider or thicker Than, say, my One Plus 8 Pro here. This is my daily driver, One Plus 8 Pro, It’s a very good phone, And you can see that the
Wing is slightly taller, And it’s slightly thicker But not so much as to be crazy, Like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2. The Wing is nine ounces and
it feels solid and heavy, It’s noticeably heavier
than most other smartphones. You look on the back here And there’s a 64 megapixel main camera And two wide-angle cameras. Why do you need two wide-angle cameras? I’ll get to that in a moment.
Now, you can use the Wing As a regular phone any way you want, It’s a perfectly normal
Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 powered Android 10 smartphone,
nice big screen here. Of course, you can use
the 64 megapixel camera With digital zoom the way you would Any other flagship smartphone. But of course, what you wanna see is this. Now, I’ve swiveled the
Wing into its swivel mode. And you see here, that the main screen Now shows a carousel of apps That LG thinks are ideal
for use in dual screen mode, And then the bottom screen
is a 3.9 inch square screen. And these can run two apps independently, Or in some cases, in
a few cases, together. Now, like the other folding phones, I’ve got app pairs that I could launch And that’ll launch two
apps at the same time. So, for instance, right
here it launched YouTube And it launched the web browser. Or, there are occasional apps
that use both screens at once, And now, the camera is the key one here. If I load the camera in swivel mode, I have a virtual gimbal now. And this has some really cool effects Where I can digitally pan
across the wide field of view In That wide-angle camera, Or, I can lock the view So that when I move the phone,
the view doesn’t change, Or, I can change The axis here So that, for instance, it really feels Like it’s smoothly moving on a gimbal.
And this is really cool. This can make your videos
feel really more professional If you don’t own a physical gimbal. Now, it’ll also do this
dual recording trick Where it’s recording with
both cameras at once. And this is something that a
lot of YouTubers really liked About certain earlier LG phones And certain earlier Samsung phones, And it went away, and now it’s back here. And it can record from both cameras, Either as one video
file or two video files. Now, there’s third party apps, I know, especially for
the iPhone, which do that, But it’s nice to see this
in the default camera. Okay, so what else can you do
with both screens together? There’s some things I can’t show you Because this is a demo
phone, very early software, It only connects to my WiFi, I don’t have WiFi down
here in the backyard, So, I can’t show you stuff That directly has to do with the internet. But let’s take a look, for
instance, here, at the Gallery. So, I have a video here that I took And that we see here That I’m playing the video in the Gallery And there’s some video
controls on the bottom screen, As well as the ability to turn it Into a GIF, for instance, or edit. And so, that gives me more
screen space for my gallery. Or, for instance, Asphalt
9, which is a driving game, You can show the main
screen of driving on the top And then there’s like a
little mini map on the bottom. One thing that I’ve really enjoyed doing With the dual screens
because I’m a journalist,
Is having a web page or something up here And then taking notes on it,
down here, in LG’s Quick Note Using a little keyboard
on the bottom screen. And now, often, yeah, I’m
just typing nonsense here, My Amazon prompt, Often, when you’re doing
something on the big screen here And you need to type something, Then the bottom screen
will become a keyboard. See, and that just happened right here. I went to the address
bar in the web browser And the bottom screen became a keyboard. And now, I anticipate That LG is going to have
more coordinated experiences, But even this way, Like I found when I was
trying out this phone That I would watch some
video on Amazon Prime Video While at the same time, be
surfing Twitter down here On the bottom screen, Or I found I would be watching
video on Amazon Prime Video While at the same time
be surfing Twitter here On the bottom screen, Or taking notes or looking at a web page As opposed to Samsung’s folding phone Which opens up into one big screen. The fact that you have
two distinct screens here Really does make a difference. It really does make multitasking Feel easier and clearer As to what you’re supposed
to be doing to multitask. Now, this is a pre-production
Korean model phone, I did not put this through
a full battery of tests. There are some things that
don’t work about it quite yet, The firmware is very early. This is coming to the US
to all three major carriers
Later this year. You can see, for instance, That this phone has some
Verizon bloatware on it, But as I said, it’s pre-production, So, it’s not fully activating
on any of the carriers. Still, though, very exciting phone. I’m really looking forward
to seeing how this does When it’s fully finished And what kind of use cases it
creates with the two screens That are so clearly physically separated And yet, unlike with the
Microsoft Surface Duo, I can grip them very easily in one hand. One problem I have with
the Microsoft Surface Duo, Which is right here, Is that when I’m holding it in both hands, The ergonomics of reaching
across the screens Gets a little difficult,
it’s still quite wide, Whereas with the LG Wing,
I’m holding it in one hand, I can really reach across
the whole bottom screen With my holding hand And then I can easily use the top screen With the other hand. The ergonomics are interesting. I think there’s a lot of potential here. So, that’s an early first
look at the LG Wing. There’s a little ways to go Before this is a final
phone for the US market, But we will have a full review
when it’s a final model.
