Joyful Things: The LG Second Screen

There's been a lot of upsetting content on my social media lately, and it's really been getting to me and my mental health. So instead of fixating on all that's been bad this week, I wanted to take some time to remind myself about some more of the joyful things in the world. That's why I'm here to write about something I loved when it was around and wish still existed: the LG Second Screen.

To give some context, the LG Second Screen is a piece of technology that appeared specifically on the LG V10 (released October 2015) and LG V20 (released September 2016). The Second Screen went away in the LG V30, released at the end of August 2017. As part of a hard-to-explain T-Mobile phone upgrade program, I was able to lease all of these phones when they came out (and in fact, I would go on to use all of the phones in the LG V-series, up until the LG V60, which is my current phone). But out of all the V-series phones I've used, I have to say I miss the V10 and V20 the most.

There are a lot of reasons these phones particularly stood out to me: the idiosyncratic design at a time when phones were becoming more similar, the inclusion of a "Quad DAC" which provided an extremely high quality wired headphone listening experience, the removable battery (!!!), and of course, the separate second screen that was positioned above the primary screen and to the right of the front-facing cameras. I've got a lot I could say about all these other features that made these phones truly unique and joyful to use, but for now, I'll be focusing on this last feature.

Let's Take A Look

First, it's important to actually see the second screen to understand what I'm talking about. I don't actually have the V10 or V20 anymore (since I only had them on lease), so we'll have to make due with some stock photos.

At first glance, it's easy to miss the second screen on the LG V10 and V20. It's not as much a screen as it is a bar, much like the Touch Bar you'd find on MacBook models between 2016 and 2020. It played a role similar to the Touch Bar as well – given different contexts, the Second Screen would display different icons and information that complemented what you were doing. You could tap on icons and buttons on the Second Screen, and swipe it to rotate through a series of different sets of information. Worth noting is that the screen itself wasn't actually separated by any space from the main screen, and it had the same material as the main screen, so it didn't feel like you were using something completely disjointed.

While I hated the Touch Bar (for reasons I'll describe in a different post), the Second Screen was game-changing. (It's also worth noting that the Second Screen came out before the Touch Bar and was actually placed somewhere sensible, instead of replacing a whole necessary row of a keyboard.) By moving some of the content that would normally clutter your main screen up to the second screen, suddenly you had more space to do what you wanted, while being able to access certain content independent of whatever you were doing.

For example, in the picture above, the second screen is showing icons of apps on your phone. You could customize which apps were included here. How this might help: Say you're watching a video on your phone and you want to quickly switch apps. Instead of clicking out of the video to scroll through your home screen, you could find and select the app while the video was still playing, without your apps blocking the video. It essentially allowed you to keep looking at one thing, while helping to prepare you for the next, which was particularly useful for someone like myself, who often forgets what I need to look for or gets distracted when I exit out of an app. (OK, maybe I do need to look into this ADHD thing after all...)

The Second Screen was just handy to use. And you were able to set it to Always-On behavior, which meant that even when your main screen was off, the Second Screen (again, think of it just as the bar on the top of your phone) stayed on. Whether you wanted to quickly launch an app, see the time, or change the song that was playing, the Second Screen allowed you to do these things without having to actually turn on your main phone screen.

Sure, it mostly sounds like a convenience feature, but it made a difference. You could check the time and your notifications just by looking at your phone, maybe because you were in a theatre and didn't want to turn your whole phone screen on, and that information was right there ready for you at the top. You could pause and play your music just like an old-school music player without having to go all the way into your Music or Spotify app. And even though it didn't have a huge functional reason, you could leave little messages for yourself that simply made the experience using your phone more joyful. Even something as simple as seeing "You got this!" or "Keep going" made my day just a bit better and helped remind me of words of affirmation in the toughest times. I just miss small little opportunities for us to customize and personalize our tech – whether it be the charms we used to be able to hang off our phones or these custom messages we could write for ourselves, we were able to reflect a bit of ourselves in our technology, and that made using it all the more memorable.

What I thought was particularly clever about the Second Screen was how it utilized the horizontal space in line with your front-facing camera without disturbing the rest of your screen. Prior to this, the front-facing camera on phones would take up quite a bit of space at the top of your phone, which prevented your screen from stretching top-to-bottom and gave your phone a much thicker bezel than it needed.

We've seen the extreme push towards bezel-less devices in recent years: iPads and iPhones dropped their home button completely, Samsung started wrapping their displays around the rounded edges of their phones, and almost everyone has gone the route of including a center notch that juts into the screen just so that your screen can stretch as far up as possible. But the Second Screen gave us a solution that – in my opinion – was far more elegant. It allowed us to have more screen space in a functional way that doesn't disturb the actual applications we're using. Today's notch approach effectively wastes the space (have you interacted with any buttons up by the notch?), while giving app designers a headache in trying to design around the notch, which may be different (or non-existent) for different phones. It cuts into videos and apps that are full-screened, with the alternative being to cut content down below the notch row, which begs the question: Couldn't we be using that space for something else? And my stance is that the Second Screen already solved that problem back in 2015. Let's bring it back!

The Real Game-Changer: Notifications

So far I've talked about the Second Screen, what it is, some of the contextual menus that it includes, and how its design is particularly functional and joyful to use. But I've omitted one crucial feature that really made the Second Screen the game-changing thing it was: how it handled notifications.

Over the years, I've complained about how annoying it was that notifications would pop up on your phone screen and block out what you're working on in a distracting way. One particularly irritating example of this is when you need to input a code that's been texted to you, and the text notification blocks the actual input box so that you can't look at both at once. I know, I know, for this particular example, iOS does a clever thing where it auto-inputs the code for you, but you can imagine this for more examples where you need to access both your notification and whatever you were looking at primarily. With the LG V10 and V20, all of your notifications popped up on the Second Screen.

Take a moment to think about that.

I didn't realize how tremendous this design choice was, until I moved from the V20 to V30 back in 2017. Having notifications stay within the Second Screen essentially meant that whatever I was looking at – whether it be an article, a video, or a mobile game – would never be blocked out. I'm sure many of us have had that annoying experience where we're trying to watch a video and suddenly we got a pop-up for a new message or email, and we have to go through the motions of swiping it away each time it happens. It's particularly bad if you're playing a real-time mobile game like Genshin Impact or Among Us and you really don't want part of your screen obstructed by unwanted notifications. And sure, there's always Do Not Disturb or other particular settings to hide notifications when you're in-game, but these don't apply to all of your apps all the time, and what if you do need to make sure you're not missing any urgent notifications? The Second Screen allowed you to still see your notifications while watching videos, while browsing the web, while playing a game, without it distracting you from what you're doing. You get to decide if the notification is important enough to navigate away from whatever you're doing.

There are a few details worth mentioning about how the Second Screen manages notifications. You can control which push notifications you get, just the same as you would today. The actual text of the notifications that show in the Second Screen are the same as what you'd also see today, albeit in a more compact form. For example, emails will show the sender's profile picture, their name, the email title, and text at the start of the email. It then had a marquee effect, where the text of the notification would slowly scroll to the left, revealing more of the text to the right, in case it didn't all fit on your Second Screen's width already. This was super handy in scanning notifications that would come up to see if they were urgent enough to need your attention.

Very importantly, this feature worked wonderfully with the Always-On behavior of the Second Screen. It meant that you could receive and read push notifications even when your phone screen was off. With certain Android phones today, you might see notification icons pop up if you have the Always-On primary display, but even if you did, you still have to turn on the screen to read the message of the push notification. Having notifications show up instead on an Always-On Second Screen meant a few different things: one, that you were able to put your phone down in front of you and get the information you needed without interacting with it; and two, that you could get information from your phone without actively looking like you were checking your phone. This second part doesn't seem like a big deal, but it makes a crucial difference in a lot of social and professional situations when you're communicating with others and don't want to be seen picking up and turning your phone on all the time. Because you didn't need to with the Second Screen. You can get that information while giving more attention to the people you're with. For me, personally, I'm someone who constantly needs to check my notifications to make sure I'm not missing anything, and with the V60 today (no second screen), this means I constantly need to turn my phone screen on and off to read through what new notifications I have.

If anything, the Second Screen got me to use my phone less, because it avoided the bad behavior I have now of constantly picking up my phone to turn the screen on and off. By being Always-On and providing information separate from the rest of my phone, it also meant that it helped me be less distracted and focus better on whatever task I was working on. It's subtle, but instead of needing to scroll through my phone to do something (with the off chance of forgetting what I was doing or seeing a different app and being reminded about something else), I could get to what I needed to do more directly, while keeping my primary focus on the primary screen. The Second Screen was more efficient, but in a way that allowed me to pay more attention to the things that I wanted (whether on the screen or off). It's almost paradoxical: in displaying more information to me, it helped me get distracted less.

All in all, the Second Screen was a tremendous, underrated feat(ure) in the world of mobile devices, and after all these years, I still think about how good it was. It was functional; it was useful; it solved so many problems we still have today (from notifications blocking what we're doing to the underutilized notch row of our screen); it was personalizable and joyful to use; and it helped build positive behaviors with how I interacted with my phone. I can't tell you how much this last part made a difference, because it's just something you have to use over time to experience. And that's what matters: the long-term experience of it was unrivaled, and that's something that unfortunately can't be conveyed in words.

This is my love letter to the Second Screen, and my pitch to phone developers out there to bring it back.