about a month ago I made two very bad decisions back toback first I went
swimming with my cell phone and then second I tasked you guys with picking
the replacement for me right out of the gate the winter was clear and I got to
work migrating my life to the ferone five which
hey oh Reddit what did you do the LG Wing you
got me guys but For Better or For Worse
I'm a man of my word so I really have been daily driving this thing for the
last month and there are a lot of things I hate about it you absolute trolls
however unexpectedly there were some things I genuinely liked even if none of
them had to do with the unique screen layout or to do with our sponsor just
like that oh it's wrong again don't be a dentist build Redux offers all kinds of
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Redux at the link below where do even begin with this thing have you ever
found yourself wishing that you had a selfie stick that was about 3 in long
and permanently attached to your phone well congratulations you just invented
the LG Wing I think it's fair to say that calling the secondary screen kind
of useless would be an act of generosity on par with declaring jibbo to be the
invention of the year for real the best thing that I can say about the swivel
screen feature is that it was relatively easy to
or at least it would have if the phone it was attached to wasn't so all around
bad but we'll get back to that in a bit because things actually started out
pretty okay the first legit use I found for the wing form factor was watching TV
on the top screen while scrolling the news on the bottom a real world 50%
increase in usable screen real estate unfortunately that only kept me
entertained for about 10 15 minutes before I realized wait I don't like
reading in Old CRT TV form factor I want
to go back to Portrait and just use picture and picture like I always have
one thing I didn't get sick of though was using the wing to show my phone to
other people this is objectively much
easier than this or at least it is until you
want to try to change the volume back here really oh another good thing though
it fits nicely in a cup holder okay but seriously though I was
surprised by how much thought l clearly
put into developing not just the hardware but even the software that
could take advantage of it like look at this the first time you deploy the
screen you'll be greeted with a tutorial that explains all the different cool
ways that you can use it bookmarking your favorite landscape apps to the
swivel menu configuring them to utilize the second screen in a variety of ways
including opening two apps at the same time more on that later or even
expanding individual apps to the second screen which is objective ly super cool
or I don't know at least it would be if the experience wasn't comically bad just
about every time I tried to use it to be
clear LG's own apps can be an okay
experience the camera app for example has this gimbal mode that mimics the
experience of using a camera on a motorized stabilizer Mount pretty neat
right I mean in practice the resulting videos pretty low resolution since LG is
using digital Zoom to enable their software stabilization but it definitely
achieves a different look and feel compared to a typical phone camera and
it's got a built-in handle the problem is that third party apps even some of
the ones that were included in the swivel menu by default struggle to make
use of the Wings unique screen layout YouTube for instance is obviously
designed to run in portrait I mean look at all this Blank Space while you're
browsing content in landscape and no effort has been made to move secondary
elements like comments for example to the B bottom screen and that's far from
the worst of it check out what happens when I try to go back from a full screen
video with my swipe in from the side navigation gesture um
hello absolutely hilarious Maps is fine though at least
until you go to search for a destination
ergonomic and it gets even worse after
struggling to think of any other app that might benefit from launching in
landscape mode all the time I settled on Team Viewer only to quickly realize that
LG's warning about unpredictable behavior on nonoptimized apps and if you
remember that's all of them was well Justified my fingerprint wouldn't read
more on that later and I couldn't find any way to get the pin pad to open
locking me out of the app completely but lonus what about the two
separate apps though actually this one felt a lot more practical to me I mean
who can hate having extra screen real estate now obviously it's not the same
as a foldable where you can just seamlessly expand your working space but
there were times that I was extremely grateful to have the inner screen like
okay you know how it's gone out of fashion to let you copy part of the text
in a messaging app well with the wing if someone sent me a phone number or a
street address for example I could just throw their message up on one screen and
then transcribe it directly into my maps app on the other
unfortunately that's about it or okay
not quite there's this bottom screen trackpad mode you can have a mouse
cursor on the top that's pretty cool coming back to a remote desktop but I'd
say any Improvement in productivity from that is probably offset by the fact that
the keyboard doesn't automatically open on the bottom screen but rather opens
like this giving you a teeny tiny little space to work with speaking of
automatically uh Android auto didn't
work at all for me the prompt to connect would come up but then the wing would
just sit there and Buzz ineffectually until it got bored and I tried
everything rebooting the phone rebooting the car a different cable uh forcing the
uninstallation of the updates and then reapplying them I finally gave up and
then 3 days later it randomly popped up
a message when I plugged it into my car just to charge and it's worked
flawlessly ever since I have no explanation for that other than I don't
know maybe it got an update but for real though I was pleasantly surprised to
find that the wing is not only running Android 13 but is still getting pretty
regular patches I got two while I was using it now you might remember that LG
got out of the phone game way back in 2021 but they promised Wing owners at
least three OS upgrades plus patches and
they seem to be keeping their word the OS was generally pretty responsive and I
didn't encounter any unexpected compatibility issues even when using
apps on the wing display if it works in landscape it works on the wing they also
took a really cool approach to carrier and manufacturer bloatware as part of
the setup process you just opt out of anything that you don't want instead of
having to go hunt them down and neutralize them in the app tray later
and this is approach I would love to see adopted by phone makers that still exist
raising the question if they can ship up toate software why don't they still
exist well see the thing is updated software doesn't mean good software
there wasn't a quick access icon in the shade for the hotspot feature so you got
to dig through the menu like a pleb if you want to share your connection the
phone app is super overzealous and turns the screen off the instant you start a
call regardless of the state of the proximity sensor so if you need to punch
in an extension or Mash zero trying to get to a human in a phone tree you need
to convince the wing to turn the screen back on and allow your input which by
the way was a serious problem with the device the entire time I had it I don't
know if we're going to be able to capture this in b-roll but it felt like
a solid 25% of the time I wanted to wake
the device I had to press the bloody button two or three times to get it to
actually accept a fingerprint input see yeah it did it this time of course it does the second I turn on the camera
sorting your apps in the drawer also feels a little broken you can just sort
them alphabetically like on any other phone but then anything installed
afterward is going to be just plunked onto the end out of order until you
manually Resort the again genius
speaking of apps while the software that comes on the phone works pretty well on
this unique aspect ratio anything else
that you download is going to be pretty hit or miss some apps just don't size
well to the smaller screen and most of them have no native multiscreen support
uninstalling apps also had its snags
though it's hard to tell if this is an LG thing or just a not Samsung thing
when I delete an app from the App Drawer I just get unceremoniously dumped back
to the home screen every single time I
can see how if you're removing just one app that's probably fine but if you're
like me and you only periodically clean up the unneeded apps from your phone it
can get kind of annoying after the third or fourth time that you're reopening the
app drawer and going back to where it is that you want to be so good job Samsung
I guess and do better everyone else
especially LG my biggest issue with the wings
software was the overnight res starts it happened about three times during my
month that the phone would just randomly reboot in the middle of the night which
shouldn't be a big deal I mean lots of phones reboot in the night to install
updates and stuff like that except that on the wing my notifications would just
stop working until I unlocked the phone again in the morning at which time all
my notifications would come flooding in which caused me to miss a couple of
morning meetings but that's probably enough time spent beating up the
software given that I need need to save some time to talk the hardware too like
most folding phones the wing is heavy
and I mean I get it you got to have enough structure in there to keep not
one but two screens rigid but
then with all that work you put into it how does it end up feeling so loose I
mean seriously guys we went out of our way to get our hands on a brand new
device in order to ensure that the hinge wouldn't just be busted from the
previous owner but after just a month on
this thing typing with the phone closed
causes a noticeable rattling under your fingers and even just holding the thing
causes the front screen to shift a little bit under your fingers and not
just the way it's supposed to swing but the other way too almost makes me want
to just get in there with an LTT screwdriver and tighten things up LTT
store.com oh and don't get me started on
the fingerprint sensor this might be the worst fingerprint sensor that I have
ever encountered it's working fine right now because of course it is I'm trying
to show you guys something but your fingers need to be exactly exactly the
same level of clean and moisturized that you were when you first set it up and
you've got to get the location and I found even the pressure sometimes just
right like seriously it worked to unlock this phone maybe 50% of the time for me
and that includes five attempts like I would often have to enter the pin and if
you flip out the wing display well that just ramps the difficulty up to Hard
Mode since it especially seemed to struggle when you tried to use it in a
different orientation than your original skan it also reveals another problem the
design of this phone even if it was practical captures a ton of dust on the
inner screen here and then on the back of the upper screen especially here
where the earpiece is that crud then scratches the crap out of these slides
around the edges of the upper screen and on the bezels of the lower screen and
even though this phone was new out of box when we got it after just a month
not only do we have scratches on there but even a few that are starting to form
right here on the bottom screen that is
pretty brutal and while we've got it flipped over by the way now seems like a
good time to check out the physical buttons using these with the screen open
is basically impossible especially if you have thicker fingers and to top it
all off the thing isn't even fidget friendly I mean you can open it
one-handed but closing it again it's a bit of a challenge especially if you
have smaller hands like look I can do it but boy is that ever a risky maneuver
the thing is if the wing was an otherwise great phone with this gimmick
I wouldn't even be complaining but using it for this last month has just been a
nightmare it is full of compromises even
compared to my older Samsung Note 9 it's it's got a weak mono speaker no
headphone jack this weird ripple effect on the screen that's especially
noticeable on light backgrounds and while they've carved out enough space
for three rear-facing cameras they're all wide angle what is up with that the
pop-up front-facing camera is kind of nifty but it's also one of the most
reported trouble points with the device which feels like an especially
unnecessary cell phone when they could have just I don't know kept the front
camera behind dis swiveling screen alongside the earpiece
speaker which okay that's actually not a great solution not everyone wants to
take a selfie with the screen and Landscape like this but it does
highlight an interesting design compromise that was made to accommodate
the sliding screen look how thin that
front screen is that is crazy there is no room to put a camera in there or even
a speaker so what they did was they put the speaker here and then they just
stabed abbed a hole in the front screen and did the engineering equivalent of
cupping their hand on it absolute genius
at least the battery life was okay not great just okay which I guess is going
to have to pass as a high note to leave
the video off on I'm honestly just happy the month is over and I can finally move
on to my pick the fairphone 5 and you
guys can finally move on with the segue to our sponsor Dennis where's your PC
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Redux all you have to do is select the top three games you play and pick your
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crying build Redux if you guys like this why not check out the 10 reasons that
I'm a big fan of foldable phones even if I'm not a big fan of ones that fold like
this it's not really folding