With potential price hikes and memory shortages on the horizon, the current period may one day be remembered as a good time for smartphones. Even though phone design has largely settled into a predictable pattern, the overall value and performance on offer remain impressive.
Flagship prices have stayed relatively stable over the past several years, and today’s best phones deliver excellent performance, strong battery life, and capable cameras. It is now common to find devices that last multiple days on a single charge and capture usable photos even at 30x zoom.
A Phone That Disappeared Too Soon
Despite the strengths of modern smartphones, there is one discontinued device that continues to stand out for its creativity and ambition.
The LG Wing, released in 2020, marked the final major release from LG’s mobile division before the company exited the smartphone market in 2021. It was the last entry in a long line of unusual and experimental phones, and arguably one of the boldest.
The Unique Design of the LG Wing
The LG Wing featured a rotating display that could swivel into a T-shaped layout. This allowed the phone to offer a landscape viewing experience without requiring the entire device to be rotated.
The main 6.8-inch display could rotate outward to reveal a secondary 3.9-inch screen underneath. This smaller panel could be used as a keyboard, media controls, or for quick multitasking. The result was a phone that could comfortably handle both portrait and landscape use at the same time.
An Alternative to Early Foldables
At the time, folding phones were beginning to gain attention, and the LG Wing may have been positioned as a different solution to the same problem. Instead of folding inward, LG opted for a rotating mechanism that kept the phone slimmer.
The Wing measured just 10.9mm thick, compared to the Galaxy Z Fold 2’s 16.8mm thickness when folded. While it did not fold, it offered versatility in a way no other phone manufacturer had attempted, and no similar design has appeared since.
Powerful Hardware With a Premium Price
Despite its unconventional design, the LG Wing was well equipped. Priced at $999 in the US, it included dual displays, a triple-camera system with a gimbal-style ultra-wide lens, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 4,000mAh battery.
Adding to its complexity, the selfie camera used a motorized pop-up mechanism. It was an ambitious device packed with moving parts and advanced features.
Why the LG Wing Did Not Last
The LG Wing was released at a difficult time for the company, and it ultimately did not prevent LG from shutting down its phone division. Devices with moving components tend to be more expensive, harder to repair, and more prone to failure than standard slab phones.
However, the Wing was not lacking in creativity. It represented a bold attempt to stand out in a market dominated by increasingly similar designs.
A Design Ahead of Its Time
Holding a phone horizontally s*. It’s not how phones are designed, and it normally leads to hand cramps. That’s why pop sockets and mobile gaming controllers exist, and it’s why vertical video is so dominant.
The LG Wing addressed this by offering both orientations at once. It allowed users to view content in landscape mode while maintaining a comfortable vertical grip. At the time, the market was not fully ready for this idea.
TikTok was only beginning to gain traction, while YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels launched in the same year as the LG Wing in 2020. The widespread shift toward vertical-first content had not yet taken hold.
A Symbol of Experimental Smartphone Design
The LG Wing feels like the kind of device that belongs in the background of a science fiction movie: unusual, ambitious, and designed to look futuristic. It resembles the kind of phone featured in a YouTube video titled “this will be smartphones in 2012,” capturing a moment of optimism and experimentation in tech design.
A Phone That Exists Only in Memory
Today, the LG Wing remains discontinued, and purchasing a second-hand unit with multiple moving parts carries obvious risks. While modern foldables continue to evolve, none have quite filled the unique space the LG Wing occupied.
The LG Wing was not a failure in concept. It was a device that arrived before the market was ready, offering a glimpse of what smartphones could have been if experimentation had continued at the same pace.
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