LG Wing

» see lg.com/wing as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the wing's peak years overlap with the last two years i was still buying handsets on impulse, but this one landed in a market layer i never touched. announced on 14 september 2020, released on 15 october 2020 in the US on t-mobile and at&t. the pitch was a main 6.8 inch p-oled slab that swiveled sideways to reveal a 3.9 inch square screen underneath, forming a t-shape you were meant to hold like a game controller. snapdragon 765g, 8 gb of ram, a 4000 mah battery, a pop-up 32 megapixel selfie camera. priced at around $999 unlocked.

this was the third or fourth attempt from lg at a two-screen phone after the v50 and v60 dual-screen cases, which had been add-on accessories rather than a native form factor. the wing took the mechanism internal. the second screen was permanently attached and swiveled out on a rotating hinge. reviewers all said the same thing: the hardware felt genuinely engineered, the software had almost no apps that used the second screen the way the pitch diagrams did.

in turkey the wing was mostly a youtube-review object. it did not launch at retail here through the official lg channels. by then lg in the local market was mostly a tv brand with a phone shelf that nobody looked at twice. i was 36 in october 2020 in ankara, on a samsung, watching the swivel demos the way you watch a concept car turn on a rotating platform: interesting, not something you actually walk over to.

~ the dossier ~

~ the swivel ~

the second screen was pitched around a couple of specific use cases. a gimbal-mode video app that used the phone as a handle with the lower screen showing camera controls. a whatsapp / navigation split where the map lived on the big screen and the reply keyboard on the small one. both worked in the reviewer bench setup. both stopped working the moment you launched an app that had not been custom-built for the wing.

the hinge itself was rated for 200,000 swivel cycles per lg's press material. the dual-screen shell weighed 260 grams, which put it in the "carrying a small brick" tier that no phone had been in since the sony ericsson satio era. battery life was middling because the second display drew constant power even in idle. the pop-up selfie camera was the same kind of moving-parts commitment oppo and vivo had already backed away from by 2020.

~ how it actually ended ~

lg's board voted on 4 april 2021 (US time) to exit the smartphone business entirely. the announcement went public on the fifth, citing roughly $4.5 billion in cumulative losses across six years. the wind-down completed on 31 july 2021. the wing had been on retail shelves for less than seven months by the time its parent brand was on its way out. the rollable prototype lg had teased at ces 2021 got cancelled in the same wave.

the exit was clean in the way lg always did exits. software updates kept coming for a while under a support commitment. warranty service ran through the usual carrier channels. the wing got android 12 and then android 13 as ports from the community rom scene rather than from lg itself. by the end of 2022 the phone existed mostly as a curiosity in used-market listings and youtube retrospectives about weird phones.

~ the long tail ~

the wing is now the kind of device tech reviewers pick up on anniversary videos to remember what "trying something" used to look like from a major manufacturer. it was the last swing from a phone brand that had already lost the fight and knew it. samsung's foldables kept going. lg's swivel did not. the pattern was the same one that killed the palm pre and the amazon fire phone: a distinctive hardware bet from a maker that could not afford the software ecosystem to make the bet pay off.

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