The Unreleased Rollable Smartphone!

Summary

Marques Brownlee gets his hands on the legendary unreleased LG Rollable — the phone LG was reportedly weeks away from launching when they shut down their entire mobile division in 2021. The unit, sourced (somehow) by dbrand, has functional hardware, working firmware, and a polished software experience. Brownlee frames it as the perfect epitaph for LG: an absurd engineering moonshot from a company that kept making “crazy” experimental phones (the LG Wing, the dual-screen G8X) without ever building the steady money-maker needed to keep the business afloat.

The concept is wild: a regular-looking 6.7” slab phone that, with a three-finger swipe, motors itself open into a 7.4” mini-tablet by rolling its flexible OLED out from behind a side rail. The display wraps around the back through a clear glass panel so you can see notifications and use the rear cameras for selfies. There are no traditional volume buttons (pressure-sensitive zones replace them); the power button doubles as the rear fingerprint reader; the motors are strong enough to push a 16-inch MacBook Pro across a table; and an LG engineer even designed a custom unroll sound to mask the motor noise.

Brownlee notes the obvious caveats: water and dust resistance look impossible (you can see exposed gear teeth and air gaps), the flexible screen is constantly exposed to the elements, and there’s still a faint crease where the panel curves around the side. There’s a 4,500mAh battery, 12GB of RAM, two motors, and three spring-loaded arms inside. He gives a shout-out to LG and points at Samsung as the only other company still rumored to be exploring the form factor.

Highlights

”LG made a bunch of crazy phones without a steady money-maker”

“So LG’s dead. Why? Well, probably because they made a bunch of crazy phones without also having like a steady money-maker at the same time. So let’s face it, it’s why we loved them, but that’s why they died.” — Marques Brownlee, 0:00

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”Three-finger swipe to roll it open”

“With a simple three-finger swipe gesture across the whole thing, the whole phone expands and it rolls open to become a slightly more squarish 7.4-inch mini tablet basically. So anytime, anywhere at all, you can three-finger swipe to roll it open or roll it closed like some sort of scroll or parchment or something.” — Marques Brownlee, 2:35

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”Coughing to cover up a fart”

“And by the way, yes, it does play that sound on the speakers every single time you open and close it, pretty sure to try to cover the sound of the motors, which you can also hear, about as effective as coughing to cover up a fart, but that’s fine. I like the idea though that there’s some engineer that had to sit in a room and come up with the perfect sound to like match the frequencies of the motor to try to hide it. That idea to me is hilarious. Good for that person.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:11

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”It can push a 16-inch MacBook Pro across a table”

“If you try to open this phone and give it a little resistance, it does actually push surprisingly hard against that resistance. So it can push a 16-inch MacBook Pro across a table with rubber feet down. That’s like five pounds!” — Marques Brownlee, 6:12

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”It can pinch things”

“Number two, uh, can it pinch you when it closes? Kind of, yes, it can pinch things. So your fingers are, are mostly too big to get pinched in the back or the bottom, but it can easily pinch smaller items and then pick them up, like microfiber cloths.” — Marques Brownlee, 6:41

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Key Points

• Why LG died (0:00) - All experimental phones, no steady moneymaker
• The LG Wing legacy (0:28) - T-shaped swivel display; emblem of LG’s last-era mobile experimentation
• G8X dual-screen case (0:58) - Magnetic pass-through charging adapter so you could fast charge with the case attached
• dbrand sourced the prototype (2:00) - “I don’t know how they get their hands on these things”
• 6.7” closed → 7.4” open (2:21) - Slab phone unrolls into a mini-tablet
• Custom motor-masking sound (3:05) - Engineered to cover motor noise; user-changeable in settings
• Hidden screen wraps around the back (4:13) - Clear glass panel lets the OLED show through for notifications and rear-camera selfies
• 64MP main + 12MP ultrawide (4:40) - Camera specs comparable to a 2021 mid-range
• No physical volume buttons (5:23) - Pressure-sensitive zones up top instead, like Mi Mix Alpha
• Power button doubles as fingerprint (5:32) - Located on the back under the cameras
• Blooming-flower lock screen animation (5:54) - Polished software animation that unfurls with the screen
• Settings app adds columns when open (6:07) - Slide-over animation when you switch states
• Surprisingly strong motors (6:12) - Push a 5-pound MacBook Pro across a table
• Squeeze-to-close protection (6:26) - Hard squeeze triggers an auto-close + error message
• No water or dust resistance (6:56) - Visible gear teeth and air gaps; flexible OLED constantly exposed
• There IS still some crease (7:52) - Less than a folding phone, but you can see it with the screen off
• 4,500mAh + 12GB RAM (8:22) - Specs uncovered by digging through settings
• Two motors + three spring-loaded arms (8:40) - Per JerryRigEverything’s teardown
• Samsung still rumored to be working on rollable (9:23) - The form factor isn’t dead

Mentions

Companies

• LG (0:00) - The defunct mobile division behind the Rollable, Wing, G8X, and Velvet
• dbrand (2:00) - Provided the prototype
• Samsung (4:00) - Older curved-edge phones cited; rumored to be working on a future rollable
• Xiaomi (4:50) - Mi Mix Alpha concept phone reference

Products & Technologies

• LG Rollable (unreleased) (0:00) - The phone in the video
• LG Wing (0:28) - LG’s swivel-display experimental phone
• LG Velvet (0:28) - LG’s last released mainstream phone
• LG G8X (0:58) - Dual-screen-case phone
• Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha (4:50) - All-around-screen concept phone, also never released
• CES rolling TV (1:46) - LG showed a rollable TV two years before the rollable phone leaked

People

• Zack / JerryRigEverything (8:22) - Did a teardown of the same prototype showing the internals

Surprising Quotes

“I don’t know how they get their hands on these things. They have their ways, I don’t ask questions.” — Marques Brownlee, 2:00

“I like the idea though that there’s some engineer that had to sit in a room and come up with the perfect sound to like match the frequencies of the motor to try to hide it. That idea to me is hilarious. Good for that person.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:20

“If it’s open and you just squeeze really hard in your hand, it can actually trigger it to finish closing itself to sort of just prevent damage, and then it flashes an error message. So clearly they really thought about this.” — Marques Brownlee, 6:26

“So you know, shout out to LG, RIP.” — Marques Brownlee, 8:56

“What we do know is they got insanely far in the development process. This is functional hardware, working software, special features, all that stuff. They just didn’t survive long enough to actually ship it.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:11

Transcript

Marques Brownlee: 0:00 So LG’s dead. Why? Well, probably because they made a bunch of crazy phones without also having like a steady money-maker at the same time. So let’s face it, it’s why we loved them, but that’s why they died.

Marques Brownlee: 0:16 But right before they were going to die, they actually did have one more trick up their sleeve, one more shot in the barrel. And now that I have it here in my hands, I think it’s safe to say this was going to be their craziest shot yet.

Marques Brownlee: 0:28 See, the last phones LG did release before they died were the LG Velvet and the LG Wing. The Wing. This is already insane. I remember doing a video about this phone, and this thing was nuts. It looked like a normal phone at first, but it was split so you could swivel the spring-loaded top layer up over the top in a horizontal orientation and then reveal a second smaller square display underneath so you could have a T-shaped screen experience for some reason.

Marques Brownlee: 0:58 All the engineering and software tricks that went into making this not just work, but feel intentional were just insane. This is the same company that also made the G8X, which was right at the beginning of the folding phone era. But they wanted to offer similar functionality at a fraction of the price, so they made a case with a built-in display so you could plug it in and have a dual-screen experience.

Marques Brownlee: 1:21 And there were all sorts of other tricks here too, like a fully folding 180-degree hinge and adding pass-through magnetic charging adapters so you could still fast charge even while the USB port was taken up by the case. Again, incredible.

Marques Brownlee: 1:34 But they got all the way to 2021 without also making a real solid consistent money-maker phone, which they would have needed to keep the whole thing alive. It runs out of money, they end up shutting down their whole mobile operation.

Marques Brownlee: 1:46 That was also right around the time that there were some rumors, though, of a rollable smartphone from them that never came out. This is two years after we first saw a rolling TV from them at CES.

Marques Brownlee: 1:58 But now the year is 2024, and I’ve got my hands on that rollable phone anyway, thanks to dbrand. I don’t know how they get their hands on these things. They have their ways, I don’t ask questions. But yeah, I imagine very few people outside of LG have ever held or seen one of these up until very recently and spoiler alert, it is definitely their most insane one yet.

Marques Brownlee: 2:21 So the concept is simple, right? You have a regular phone again when it’s closed, about a 6.7-inch display diagonally, looks kind of like a regular slab phone. I mean, it obviously isn’t, but we’ll get to that in a second.

Marques Brownlee: 2:35 But then, with a simple three-finger swipe gesture across the whole thing, the whole phone expands and it rolls open to become a slightly more squarish 7.4-inch mini tablet basically. So anytime, anywhere at all, you can three-finger swipe to roll it open or roll it closed like some sort of scroll or parchment or something. It’s funny, the number 6.7 to 7.4 doesn’t sound like that big of a difference on paper, but it’s obviously the shape of the display that’s changing quite a bit.

Marques Brownlee: 3:05 And by the way, yes, it does play that sound on the speakers every single time you open and close it, pretty sure to try to cover the sound of the motors, which you can also hear, about as effective as coughing to cover up a fart, but that’s fine.

Marques Brownlee: 3:20 I like the idea though that there’s some engineer that had to sit in a room and come up with the perfect sound to like match the frequencies of the motor to try to hide it. That idea to me is hilarious. Good for that person.

Marques Brownlee: 3:33 So the rollable concept itself is kind of interesting, like you could see how someone could convince themselves that this is a good idea. Like some might want a foldable, but maybe you don’t. Maybe you want a different way of having a large screen in your pocket and no crease, right? So that’s an upside.

Marques Brownlee: 3:52 But once you actually make the phone, then you realize how insane this has to be. First of all, you gotta store that extra screen somewhere, so when you’re looking at it like a normal phone, it appears to just be a single screen that kind of bends over both edges, like a lot of those older Samsung phones from when this was trendy.

Marques Brownlee: 4:13 But the extra screen is hidden in plain sight, it’s just to the right where it dips off behind this rail. And if you flip the phone over, you can actually see the rest of the display curving over the back here. And LG decided to make that a clear glass as well so you can actually still see it and you can turn on that back part of the display for various little software tricks like displaying messages or even showing camera UI so you can take selfies with the primary cameras, which are still back here. There’s a 64-megapixel main and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide.

Marques Brownlee: 4:50 This part actually kind of reminds me of the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha, if you remember that phone. I showed this on video. Xiaomi had this concept phone that also never went on sale and it didn’t expand or anything like that, but it was basically all screen all the way around, which was insane. And it let them play with stuff to put on the sides and back of the phone for the ultimate screen-to-body ratio.

Marques Brownlee: 5:10 Similar to that phone though, there’s not really enough room on the side of this phone with the rails to actually have real buttons. So on the left side, the volume buttons are actually pressure-sensitive areas up at the top where the buttons normally would be. And then the power button is just on the back of the phone doubling as the fingerprint reader underneath those cameras. Seems kind of weird at first, but surprisingly reachable.

Marques Brownlee: 5:40 I mostly though just love that they clearly got so far into working on this idea that they got to this stage of like developing those little software tricks to make it feel like a smooth experience. Like this, this is the lock screen, one of the lock screens. Look at this animation when it expands. This like blooming flower thing. And then when you shrink it, it goes back down to a single petal. That’s kind of cool.

Marques Brownlee: 6:00 Couple little things that I noticed, just stuff that I wouldn’t have thought about until I actually got my hands on it. One, is the motors are stronger than I think you would expect. Like it’s not unbreakable, but it’s really impressive. Also the settings app, you can see this little slide-over animation when you go from closed to open to add a column to the settings app. That’s nice.

Marques Brownlee: 6:12 If you try to open this phone and give it a little resistance, it does actually push surprisingly hard against that resistance. So it can push a 16-inch MacBook Pro across a table with rubber feet down. That’s like five pounds!

Marques Brownlee: 6:16 And then when you go from open to closed, that subtle slide-over to take that column away. Honestly, it feels like they were really close to releasing this. So then, quick rapid fire through a few more things. But also, if it’s open and you just squeeze really hard in your hand, it can actually trigger it to finish closing itself to sort of just prevent damage, and then it flashes an error message. So clearly they really thought about this.

Marques Brownlee: 6:41 Then number two, uh, can it pinch you when it closes? Kind of, yes, it can pinch things. So your fingers are, are mostly too big to get pinched in the back or the bottom, but it can easily pinch smaller items and then pick them up, like microfiber cloths.

Marques Brownlee: 6:56 Then three, okay, there’s no way this is water resistant or dust resistant, probably. I know they never got to the stage maybe of being marketed or IP rated or even named for that matter, but when it’s open, I mean, look at these teeth. You can just tell. You can see the teeth of the gears at the top and the bottom, you can see air gaps. So between that and the fact that this soft flexible display is constantly exposed to the elements unlike a regular modern folding phone where it’s protected all the time, this was probably not going to have the best durability.

Marques Brownlee: 7:28 So then number four, okay, so you can change the different sounds that play when you unroll and I think they’re all roughly the same length of time that it takes to unroll. So you can hear these different versions of sounds that play that can mask the sounds of the motors. You can also turn that sound completely off, in which case the motor by itself sounds like this.

Marques Brownlee: 7:52 Then number five, uh, there is less of a crease than a folding phone, yes, but it’s not no crease. Like theoretically one of the biggest advantages of a form factor like this is the display doesn’t have to fold in half around a super tight radius. But you know, there is still some curve here to roll over to the side, so there’s just a larger radius of something, like just a little wavering you can see a little bit more clearly when the display is off. Not really a big deal compared to some of the creases we’ve seen, but something interesting I found.

Marques Brownlee: 8:22 There are some other notable specs that I found while just digging through the settings here, like a 4,500 milliamp hour battery and a 12 gigs of RAM. None of this stuff really matters because it’s not a real phone, but if you want to see how hilariously over-engineered the inside of this phone is, you can watch Zack JerryRigEverything’s video because he also got one and he took those screws and took them out and it looks ridiculous inside.

Marques Brownlee: 8:40 And you can see in his video there’s not just one, but two motors that are doing all the opening and closing of the phone and then there’s these like three spring-loaded arms pushing the whole chassis over to the side while it unrolls. It’s wild. I’ll link his video below.

Marques Brownlee: 8:56 So you know, shout out to LG, RIP. Uh, stay tuned. Catch you guys in the next one.

Marques Brownlee: 9:00 We clearly don’t know like how much they would have charged for this or even what they would have called it, you know, you can leave your best guesses at something like that down below.

Marques Brownlee: 9:11 But what we do know is they got insanely far in the development process. This is functional hardware, working software, special features, all that stuff. They just didn’t survive long enough to actually ship it.

Marques Brownlee: 9:23 I would say it feels like LG’s the only one who would actually try to ship a phone like this, but you know, there is word on the street that Samsung is also trying to do a rollable type of smartphone even still. Maybe this year, maybe in the future, we’ll see. Definitely get subscribed to be among the first to see that if it does come out because I’ll definitely get my hands on that.

Marques Brownlee: 9:43 But yeah, now you’ve seen it. The unreleased LG Rollable phone. Let me know your thoughts down below. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace.