Teardown of unreleased LG Rollable shows why rollable phones aren’t a thing

LG’s last gasp

In 2020, LG’s mobile division was searching for a way to stand out. The company tried hand gestures, rotating screens, phone cases with secondary screens, and rehashing old hardware with more stylish exteriors—none of it worked. Maybe the Rollable would have stood out if it launched in 2021 as planned, but looking at how it’s built, it’s hard to see how it could have been a successful product.

There’s no doubt this piece of hardware is very cool. It’s overengineered to an impressive degree, particularly for LG. That may sound like a dig, but it’s not! This device demonstrates the kind of 2020 engineering chops we’d expect from the likes of Samsung. It doesn’t look like something designed by a company that was mere months away from killing its smartphone division.

The rollable uses two motors on a geared track to expand the frame.

Credit:
JerryRigEverything

Okay, but there are problems with that kind of engineering. The complexity of the internals would have made the Rollable extremely expensive to manufacture, and it would have demanded a high price tag. Asking people to pay Galaxy Z money for an LG phone in 2021 was probably a non-starter.

Durability is also a big concern. There’s just a lot going on inside this phone, with multiple motors, springy arms, tracks, and a screen that has to loop around the back. Even unpowered hinges on foldable phones add an additional point of failure, and they do fail sometimes. It took Samsung a few tries to design a hinge that wouldn’t be defeated by dust, and a motorized phone would be even more vulnerable. It seems unlikely the LG Rollable could have survived daily use for multiple years.

As neat as this phone looks, no one ever pursued the form factor. LG wasn’t alone in demoing rollables back then. Motorola, Oppo, and others showed off similar hardware at press events and trade shows, presenting the rollable as the next evolution of foldables. Still, no one has released a rollable even as foldables continue to chug along. Were they too fragile? Too expensive? Too loud? Maybe it was a mix of all of the above, based on what we’ve now seen of the LG Rollable. Manufacturing this phone at scale would have been a major undertaking, so it’s not too surprising that LG just gave up rather than risk it.

Because LG never launched the Rollable, the Wing with its weird rotating screen went down in history as the company’s final smartphone release.