Do you remember what smartphones were like in the early 2000s? Then there was no talk of iPhone, and the market was dominated by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Siemens, which produced truly bombing devices, unlike everything that competitors did. Sliders, clamshells, flips – so many things. But, perhaps, the most indelible impression in my memory was left by Siemens SK65 with a rotary mechanism. Apparently, LG decided to repeat the success of the Germans and presented her vision of this form factor.
LG Wing is the first smartphone in the rotator form factor in the last 10 years
To begin with, a small educational program. A rotator is a mechanism that assumes the presence of two parallel elements that can rotate relative to each other. In the case of Siemens SK65, it was the keyboard on the bottom and the display on the top. But, unlike clamshells and horizontal sliders, here, in order to access the keyboard, you had to rotate the top 90 degrees. As a result, a cross was obtained from, in fact, the keyboard and the front panel with a display and dialer buttons.
Swivel smartphone
This is what the most attractive smartphone from the 2000s looked like, according to myself:
This is Siemens SK65 – the best smartphone of the 2000s
Apparently, one of the engineers LG was also partial to Siemens SK65, and therefore at some point decided that it would be nice to create something similar, but in a modern design. This is how LG Wing appeared. The only pity is that there is no practical benefit from such a solution.
Obviously, in the era of foldable smartphones LG wanted to do something different. But since Samsung, Huawei and Microsoft already introduced their own foldable form factor solutions, LG needed a radically different approach. The solution was found in the rotary mechanism. It's just that under the external display, the Koreans have placed not a keyboard with which it would be more convenient to interact with text, presentations and – banal – write comments, but a second, but more compact display.
Why do you need a smartphone with two screens
Two screens are, in principle, a pretty big compromise, but some manage to benefit from it
The external display LG Wing is quite large. It has a diagonal of 6.8 inches and is made with P – technology OLED. Internal display – 3.9-inch – manufactured using G technology – OLED. The designers LG have placed them slightly offset from each other. As a result, it turned out that when you rotate the external display, it does not form a cross, but a T-shaped structure. This was done on purpose to justify the few dual-screen use cases that are planned to be offered to users. By the way, here they are:
- Typing and editing text;
- Placing playback controls;
- Displaying notifications without overlapping content on the main screen;
- Navigator launch and route guidance;
- Conclusion of a map or other auxiliary elements in games;
- Simultaneous launch of two applications with the possibility of parallel interaction.
To be honest, some of these scenarios look a little far-fetched. Take games, for example. Personally, I strongly doubt that there are many avid gamers who decide to buy the LG Wing just because it offers to place the map in races on a separate screen. The only scenario that seems to me to be applicable in practice is to run two applications at the same time.
But instead of offering more or less adequate combinations of applications, LG chose simultaneous watching a movie and making a phone call as one of the two suggested combinations. I have no idea what genius came up with this, but he clearly needs to write out the Shnobel Prize.
Price and Features LG Wing
Just look at how LG suggests using two screens
There is nothing special about the hardware either:
- Processor: Snapdragon 76 5G;
- Memory: 8/128, 8/256 GB;
- Battery: 4000mAh;
- Camera: 64, 13 and 12 megapixels;
- Price: 1099 euros
Did it make sense, in principle, to make a second display in this form factor? In my opinion, no. Much more logical, as for me, would be, firstly, to place the keyboard on the bottom, and, secondly, to change the direction of rotation so that the display remains horizontal and the keyboard rotates relative to it. In this case, by turning the mechanism, it would be very convenient to both type text and play, controlling the gameplay using physical keys. I'm not sure that I would buy such a device, but at least it would be more logical and more convenient to use.