LG Wing 5G Review

The wildest phone of late 2020, the LG Wing ($999) has a unique swiveling screen that brings a breath of fresh, creative air to the stale world of rectangular smartphones. Its T-shaped two-screen layout makes it the ultimate phone for multitaskers who like to take notes while in Zoom meetings or access both music and maps while driving. It also has a Gimbal video mode that simulates a Steadicam attachment. I wish this innovative device were a slam dunk, but the phone is extremely heavy, and underpowered for the price. The promise of using two screens at once also falls a little flat when you realize that third-party apps likely won't take advantage of the new design.

Perfect to a 'T'?

The LG Wing looks like a big, thick, but ordinary smartphone. At 6.67 by 2.93 by 0.43 inches (HWD), it's roughly the same width and height as other large flagships, and thicker by about 0.1 inch. But whoof, it weighs 9.17 ounces. I called the 8-ounce iPhone 12 Pro Max too heavy, so this one is a brick—though there's a reason for that. Push the bottom of the screen up and clockwise, and boom! The phone is in a "T" shape, with the large screen above in landscape orientation and a smaller screen below.

The main screen is a 6.8-inch, 2,460-by-1,080 AMOLED at 395ppi. The smaller one is a nearly-square, 3.9-inch, 1,240-by-1,080 OLED display at 419ppi. Unlike with folding phones, the two screens aren't designed to be used as one fluid display: They're a primary and a secondary panel. On the glossy back of the lower screen, there's a triple-camera stack. To use those cameras, you hold the phone up as if it were a cross to ward off vampires.

Once you get past the coolness, you'll notice some flaws. The color balance isn't very saturated, especially in comparison to Samsung phones, which really punch up the colors. There's a single, loud, aggressively tinny speaker on the bottom; USB-C or Bluetooth headphones are a must. (There's no 3.5mm headphone jack.)

The hinge moves smoothly, and LG says that it's rated for at least 200,000 rotations. It doesn't hold at any location other than zero and 90 degrees; once you push it, it's going to swivel automatically on a spring until it snaps into place.

Shockingly for something this oddly shaped, the phone has an IP54 rating for water resistance. The internal components have a spray-on waterproof coating; how long it will hold up with the parts constantly moving is hard to say.

Performance That Doesn't Really Take Flight

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 Wing scores 7,946 on PCMark Work 2.0; 596 single-core, 1,858 multi-core on Geekbench; 318 on Basemark Web; and 17fps on-screen, 21fps off-screen with the GFXBench Car Chase graphics benchmark. By comparison, the $699 Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G scores 12,705 on PCMark Work 2.0, 392 on Basemark Web, and 45fps and 52fps on the GFXBench tests. It's clear that the Wing is operating at sub-flagship performance levels. Its scores are closer to those of the LG Velvet and the OnePlus Nord N10, two midrange phones that cost at least $300 less than the Wing's premium price.

The Wing does have flagship levels of RAM, though, and that's important. The 8GB of RAM is needed to keep all of that multitasking running.

How We Test Phones

The giant 4,000mAh battery runs out of juice surprisingly quickly. With the main screen in portrait orientation and the smaller screen hidden, the Wing streamed video over Wi-Fi for 9 hours, 15 minutes before conking out. Any recent large-size Samsung or Apple phone will surpass that by two hours or more.

The Wing has wireless charging and Qualcomm QuickCharge 4, allowing for fast charging using USB-C PD adapters at up to 28W.

Middling Connectivity

LG does not sell an unlocked, all-carrier Wing. There are two different hardware models: a Verizon/AT&T version and a T-Mobile version. I tested a Verizon model.

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.)

The T-Mobile version of the Wing can presumably handle T-Mobile's mid-band 4G as well as any other phone on the market. However, my Verizon-locked phone can't connect to T-Mobile's network, so I couldn't test its performance there.

5GHz 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.

Software as Unusual as Its Hardware

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 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).

Once revealed, the bottom screen displays a small version of the Android home screen. Among the icons at the bottom of the small screen, you now have pairs of apps that will open together, such as YouTube and Chrome, or Google Maps and YouTube Music.

Most of the time, the two screens operate independently. This comes in handy. My most frequent use was to pop open LG's QuickNote or Microsoft's OneNote on the bottom screen and jot notes while reading a web page or watching a video on the top screen. The Music-Maps combination looks great for driving, but there's one big UI failure: no Skip Ad button on the small screen, leaving you to endure long ads instead of your favorite playlist. A texting-and-Maps combination isn't bad if you're lost (but please pull over before texting).

You can also read two web pages at once. That's convenient, but the top page is in Landscape mode and the bottom one is small. They're certainly readable, but it isn't as natural an experience as, say, two side-by-side, portrait-style pages on the Galaxy Z Fold 2.

The Ecosystem Pitfall

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.

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.

LG's dual-screen case for the V60 and the most recent round of foldable phones work around this problem by working with standard Android apps. But the Wing has two screens, with different sizes and aspect ratios, that aren't next to each other and don't form a single rectangle together, and third-party developers don't plan for that.

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.

Cameras: a Gimbal Gambol

The LG Wing has a main 64-megapixel camera on the back that defaults to taking 16-megapixel photos by combining every four small pixels into one brighter one. The camera has a "2x zoom" option, but it's digital zoom; it just crops the middle out of a 64-megapixel image. I found those resulting zoom shots to look quite good. They didn't seem dimmer than shots taken with the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, and they were plenty sharp. There's also a 13-megapixel, 117-degree wide-angle camera on the back, and a 32-megapixel pop-up selfie camera on the front.

Compared to the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, the LG's sharpening is more aggressive, but I like that. Photos taken with this camera really brought out the texture of bricks and the stubble on my face. The Wing's primary camera is flagship level, no question about it. You may like it more or less than other flagship cameras, but I think that comes out to a matter of taste.

In low light, it's hard to compare the LG and the Samsung because they make consistently different exposure decisions. In my tests, the LG always went for a longer exposure: 1/10 when the Samsung chose 1/20, or 1/30 when the Samsung chose 1/60. That results in more detailed images, but with a greater risk of blur if you don't hold the camera still. (I noticed this when whipping out both phones to take a quick snapshot indoors. The LG was blurry at 1/24, while the Samsung was sharper at 1/40.) The LG may have been using a longer exposure because the sensor isn't as sensitive as the Samsung's. Photos taken on the Samsung have more saturated colors in low light; the LG's images look a touch washed out.

I ran into one irritating problem: In low light, when taking photos of objects at short distances, there were sometimes problems with focus lock, resulting in blurry images. This tends to happen on high-megapixel phones that don't have some sort of focus assist light, and it can be frustrating. The Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a focus assist sensor, so it does better in those situations.

The Wing's Portrait mode is particularly fun and notable because of its filters. Sure, it can do the usual background blur and "stage lighting" where it blanks out the background. But it can also turn the background into a cartoon or an outline, making for a great effect I haven't seen on other phones.

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.

The Wing's Gimbal mode, which imitates a Steadicam, appears to be magic, and it is—of the sleight-of-hand variety. The Gimbal mode relies on a 12-megapixel, 120-degree ultra-wide-angle camera that's rotated 90 degrees relative to the other cameras on the phone. I've seen this trick once before, on the Moto One Action, which used a rotated camera to let you take horizontal videos while holding the phone vertically.

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.

There are a bunch of options to play with in the Gimbal mode. You can lock the view so that when you move the phone around, the frame stays still. You can let the frame move, but only on the horizontal axis, preventing vertical shake when you're walking. You can pan with a joystick rather than by moving the phone. (You can't zoom, because you're already using all the pixels.)

The best thing about the Gimbal mode is the panning and what that does to your mind. Typically, when I shoot a video with my phone, I try to keep the frame still because moving the phone around with my hand introduces some wobble and a kind of motion that can be distracting. But the digital panning on the Wing's Gimbal mode is perfectly smooth and feels very professional. That's really nice.

There are a few downsides to this. For one thing, you can't combine pixels to detect more light. On the main camera, the default mode is to combine four 0.8-micron pixels into 1.6-micron pixels for 12-megapixel images; with 1080p video, you can do further pixel combination because you only really need 2.1 megapixels at one time. The gimbal camera says it has 1.4-micron "big pixels," but since it can't ever combine them, images are dimmer and basically useless at night.

Also, at least some of the anti-shake is digital, and you can see it in the resulting video. The gimbal camera has a hexa motion stabilizer to physically reduce shake, but of course it's not going to be as smooth as if you had a real gimbal. When I created intense shaking by skipping along the street while I took video, I could see some distracting digital tearing in the image as the algorithms tried to keep it together.

Will the Wing Be a Thing?

The Wing is a genuinely innovative product. Its Gimbal mode can enable some great filmmaking. Its two screens let you pair passive activities (streaming videos, watching webinars) with active ones (researching on IMDB, taking notes) for a rich, engaged experience.

On the other hand, it's really heavy, performance isn't what I expect from a $1,000 phone, and, most importantly, I don't have faith in LG to further develop and expand the software ecosystem for the form factor. The phone's basic app experience isn't likely to improve or expand with time.

Gimbal mode is cool, but real gimbals aren't that expensive. A DJI Osmo Mobile 3 or Om 4 gimbal costs $80–130. Pair that gimbal with a $699 iPhone 12 mini or Samsung Galaxy S20 FE, and you have better overall phone performance at a lower price than the $999 Wing. Of course, having to tote an extra gimbal around isn't quite as convenient, which is part of the point of the Wing.

There's an old lyric from the British rapper The Streets that always comes into my head for phones like this: "Cult classic, not best seller." When you're out with friends and you flip open an LG Wing, you're going to get comments and stares. You'll be a cool weirdo. Then you can pan around the table with your Gimbal mode, capturing reactions. If that's your game, it'll be a fun one.

Posted in: Cell Phone