LG's latest Explorer Project lineup aims to shake off the smartphone industry with innovative ideas, and the Wing 5G shows some real promise.
After many leaks and teases from the past few weeks, LG has officially dropped the curtain for the new Wing 5G. This is the first fruition of the company's latest Explorer Project lineup, which aimed to bring the fun back in smartphone design, and it doesn't disappoint.
There is a lot to talk about this wondrous smartphone, so we'll start with the screen. At first glance, you'll be greeted with the same 6.8" P-OLED 20.5:9 1080p+ screen panel used on the V60 ThinQ 5G and the Velvet. Swivel the screen 90⁰ left and you'll find a secondary 3.9" G-OLED 1080p+ screen panel underneath it with a 1.5:1 aspect ratio. It's not a perfect square like in BlackBerry Passport, but we're just being nitpicky here.
LG realized that people will swivel the screen a lot, so the engineers have poured in a lot of thoughts for the mechanism. The hinge module features Hydraulic Damper that reduces stress on the mechanism when the large screen is rotated. A polyoxymethylene (POM) thermoplastic is applied to the back of the large screen for smoother swivelling and preventing scratches to the second screen. Don't worry about long term reliability as LG has tested the hinge mechanism for more than 200,000 swivels and it's still proved reliable. That is 5.5 years of reliability assuming that you swivel the screen 100 times every single day.
The possibilities with both screens are totally limitless. Just like the DualScreen case, you can run a single app that can be expanded to both screens or two apps simultaneously. When watching videos from sites like YouTube in landscape orientation, you can have the whole video placed on the top screen with all the controls and notifications located at the bottom screen. Another practical application of the hardware is running Google Maps on the main screen while getting calls and messages from the secondary screen in portrait orientation. If creativity is your cup of tea, you will definitely have a lot of fun toying around with multiple apps. You can watch Lew from Unbox Therapy talking in great detail about what you can do with both screens.
LG didn't play second fiddle with the camera hardware either. The triple camera setup borrows the same 64MP main camera and 13MP ultrawide camera from the V60. But whereas the V60 has a third 3D ToF sensor, LG has something called the "Ultra Wide Big Pixel" camera. In essence, it is a second ultrawide sensor with 12MP resolution and a large 1.4µm pixel pitch. It also houses a wacky feature called the Gimbal Motion Camera feature. When doing a video recording in Swivel Mode, it will utilize the 12MP ultrawide camera with several gimbal-like features, such as follow mode and shake reduction lock to name just two, while also providing the secondary screen as a handgrip. As for the front camera, it houses a 32MP Quad Bayer sensor with a motorized pop-up mechanism.
Specifications wise, we are looking at Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G with 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal storage with a microSD card support for larger storage. The battery has a 4,000mAh capacity with wireless charging capability. As for protection, you still get MIL-STD-810G shockproof resistance as in any other LG smartphone but you have to sacrifice the usual IP68 dust/water resistance in favour of the IP54 water splash resistance. Speaking of sacrifices, audiophiles will be disappointed to know that this phone will not have a 3.5mm audio jack port. Ironically, offline FM Radio support is available out of the box.
At the time of this writing, LG didn't disclose the price and availability of the Wing 5G. However, LG has announced that South Korea will be the first market to see a public release starting next month with North America and the European market will be followed later on. In the meantime, you can rewatch the official announcement from LG Mobile Global's YouTube channel and also learn more about the phone from its dedicated website. Mobile app developers who have a strong interest in this phone can head over to this website to download the SDK files for necessary development.
It's about time we put a brake on the hardware spec race and focus on evergreen design or out-of-the-box innovations. Smartphones shouldn't be as dull as any other 900 million thousand generic-looking models out there. We definitely love to see more like this in the future.
Source: LG Newsroom
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