Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/15/behold-lgs-wing-smartpho.html
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Looks like the Skatewing of telephones.
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This looks like something the CEO came up with when they were high, and everyone in the meeting where they discussed it was too afraid to say “This is literally the dumbest thing ever invented.”
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On the other hand, this may be brilliant. It’s like the old sliding keyboard phones, where you can have your full size screen and your keyboard without cutting your screen in half. But it still has the flexibility of a touchscreen keyboard for various languages, numbers / punctuation, and various emoji character sets.
The big problem is form factor and durability. The old sliding keyboard phones were much, much thicker, and always felt flimsy; which is probably going to do in folding screen phones and quite possibly this one too. If the screen feels substantial and yet is thin enough to not make the phone feel too thick, they may have a shot. Of course, it also has the advantage of being able to use a screen keyboard as well when you don’t want to open it up.
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I feel like this is what came out of two engineers arguing about vertical vs landscape video.
This is the embodiment of why not both.jpg
Disclaimer, I use an LG G7.
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God, I miss HTC keyboard phones.
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Features like this, however interesting, are doomed to fail because the Android ecosystem will never support them. As a mobile developer, I can tell you there is zero incentive to support this kind of thing, and Android does little to make it easy to handle novel hardware. Apple always comes out ahead here because they own the whole experience top to bottom. Obviously that has other effects that people don’t like and I don’t have a dog in that fight. However, the hardware companies going off iterating on the their own isn’t accomplishing much. In our office we have a couple of the prototype Samsung folding screen phones (remember that hype?). They’re useless because no software (or even the OS itself) properly supports it (and not just because they both acquired dead pixels in the fold within weeks).
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My last non-smartphone was the LG enV Touch. Touchscreen (resistive, portrait) on front, and flipped open on the long edge to reveal a 2nd screen (landscape) and phys querty pad + stereo speakers. Durable and fun to use.
I’m a big fan of LG and would consider trying the Wing, but, what’s this, no 3.5mm audio jack? Nevermind!
ETA: Oh yeah, and the “flip to reveal yet another screen” reminds me of this:
A 5G phone shaped like a crucifix!? WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!
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