LG’s V50 answers the foldable phone craze with a detachable second screen

The LG V50. Sure it looks boring here, but... [credit:
LG ]




Mobile World Congress looks to be all about funky form factors this year, and following the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X, LG is (sort of) tossing its hat into the foldable smartphone ring. LG's newest flagship, the (deep breath) 'LG V50 ThinQ 5G,' is not a foldable smartphone, but it does have an optional case with a whole second screen on it. With two near-identical phone displays next to each other, you can get a lot of the split-screen functionality of a foldable smartphone. There are even some interesting new use cases LG has dreamed up.
On the surface, the LG V50 is mostly a bog-standard 2019 smartphone. You're getting a 6.4-inch 3120×1440 notched display, a Snapdragon 855 SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, three rear cameras, two front cameras, and a 4000mAh battery. There's a microSD card, an increasingly-rare headphone jack, and a USB-C port. The one thing that makes it stand out from the pack is that this is a 5G phone, with mmWave capability brought to you by the Snapdragon X50 modem. Note that this is not necessarily a good thing, as this first-generation 5G hardware greatly complicates smartphone design.
Form the phone Voltron
You can take your middle-of-the-pack LG phone and strap on the 'LG DualScreen' accessory, and suddenly this phone becomes interesting. The DualScreen is basically a folio case, but on the inside, instead of a soft screen cover, there is an entire second OLED display. The case adds a 6.2-inch 2160×1080 display to the V50's built-in 6.4-inch, 3120×1440 display, and a stiff hinge in the middle means you can have two screens side by side.
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