Smartphone: Rollable Features and What to Know

So LG is dead. Why? Well, probably because they made a bunch of crazy phones without also having, like, a steady moneymaker at the same time. So let's face it: it's why we love them. But. that's why they died. But right before they were gonna 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. 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? 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. 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! But they got all the way to 2021 without also making a real, solid, consistent moneymaker 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. 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. But now the year is 2026, 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. 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. 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.

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! So the rollable concept itself is kind of interesting. Like, you could see how someone would 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. But once you actually make the phone, then you realize how insane this has to be. First of all, you've got to 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. 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 ultrawide. 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. 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. I mostly, though, just love that they clearly got so far into working on this idea that they got to the 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. goes back down to a single petal. That's kind of cool. 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. And then when you go from open to closed, that subtle slide-over to take that column away.

It-honestly, it feels like they're. really close to releasing this. So then quick, rapid fire through a couple other 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. 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! 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've really thought about this. Then number two: Can it pinch you when it closes? Kind of, yes. It can pinch things. So your fingers 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. 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. 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. Then number five: 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. There are some other notable specs that I found while just digging through the settings here, like a 4,500 milliamp-hour battery and 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 from JerryRigEverything's video because he also got one and he took those screws and took them out, and it looks ridiculous inside. 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. So, you know, shout-out to LG. R.I.P. 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, 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. I would say it feels like LG is 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. 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!