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| The LG Rollable almost launched back in 2021 |
It’s been five years since LG quietly bowed out of the smartphone business, leaving behind a legacy of bold, eccentric, and sometimes bewildering designs. While rivals played it safe with slab after glass slab, LG gave us the modular LG G5, the dual-screen LG V60, and perhaps its most audacious experiment of all: the LG Wing, with its swiveling T-shaped display. But there was another device — one that never made it to store shelves, yet still haunts the dreams of mobile enthusiasts. That device is the LG Rollable.
Now, thanks to a painstaking teardown from YouTube’s resident durability expert, we finally know exactly how LG’s phantom rollable phone worked — and why it still feels years ahead of its time.
A Ghost From LG’s Final Days
Let’s rewind to early 2021. LG’s mobile division was hemorrhaging money, and rumors were swirling about an impending shutdown. But inside the company’s labs, engineers were putting the finishing touches on something extraordinary: a smartphone with a display that could physically expand from a compact 6.8 inches to a tablet-like 7.4 inches at the push of a button. No hinges. No folding crease. Just smooth, motorized rolling.
The LG Rollable was shown off as a concept at CES 2021, and it looked almost production-ready. Then, in April 2021, LG confirmed it was exiting the smartphone market. The Rollable, along with other unreleased prototypes, seemed destined for a storage bin. But a tiny number of units did escape — handed out to LG employees for testing. A few even found their way to reviewers in 2022, offering tantalizing glimpses of what could have been.
Yet until now, nobody had dared to fully disassemble one. These devices are impossibly rare, and any damage is irreversible. But the folks at JerryRigEverything (Zack Nelson) got their hands on a surviving LG Rollable prototype and did what they do best: they took it apart, carefully, on camera.
Inside the Rollable: Motors, Springs, and Magic
The teardown video, published this week, is a masterclass in engineering appreciation. From the outside, the Rollable looks like a normal — if slightly thick — smartphone. But when you press a button, the display begins to unfurl from the left side, extending horizontally. The mechanism is eerily silent and smooth, a stark contrast to the clunky mechanical slides of old.
Under the hood, LG employed a surprisingly sophisticated system. Two miniature electric motors work in perfect sync, driving a set of three articulated arms that form a spring-loaded telescoping mechanism. As the motors push the display outward, these arms extend evenly, ensuring that the flexible OLED panel rolls out flat without any wrinkles or slack. When retracting, the springs assist the motors to pull everything back into a compact, rigid chassis.
What’s truly clever is what happens to the excess display when the phone is closed. The rolled-up section of the OLED doesn’t just disappear into a dark void. Instead, it wraps around a transparent glass panel on the back of the phone, becoming a secondary always-on display. In that retracted state, you can see notifications, the time, or even a preview of what your main camera sees — perfect for framing selfies with the high-resolution rear sensors.
That dual-purpose design is pure LG. It’s the kind of lateral thinking that gave us the Wing’s swivel screen and the V series’ dual displays. And it works. In the video, the Rollable’s screen still lights up, still rolls, and still functions after five years of storage — a testament to the durability of LG’s engineering.
Why This Never Reached Your Pocket
So why didn’t the LG Rollable launch? The official reason is the closure of LG’s mobile division. But the teardown hints at other challenges. The mechanism, while elegant, is complex and expensive to manufacture. There are dozens of tiny moving parts, ribbon cables that flex with every extension, and a bespoke flexible OLED that had to be sourced from LG Display. Cost would have been astronomical — easily north of $1,500 — and the market for experimental form factors was, and remains, niche.
There’s also the question of long-term durability. JerryRigEverything notes that while the Rollable survived years of storage and his careful disassembly, it’s full of potential failure points. Dust ingress, motor fatigue, and the constant flexing of the display’s wiring could become problems after months of daily use. Samsung and others have since released foldables with IP ratings and refined hinges, but a rolling display adds another layer of complexity.
Still, watching the mechanism in action, you can’t help but feel a pang of loss. The rollable form factor offers a genuine advantage over foldables: no crease, no soft folding glass, and a continuous, uninterrupted surface whether open or closed. It’s arguably the more elegant solution. And LG had it ready to go.
The Teardown: Does It Survive?
Of course, no JerryRigEverything video is complete without a little destruction. After marveling at the internals, Zack puts the Rollable’s display through his famous scratch, burn, and bend tests. The flexible OLED performs as expected — scratches at a level 2-3 on the Mohs scale, and a lighter causes permanent pixel damage. But the bend test is the real surprise.
Because the Rollable’s body is largely filled with the rolling mechanism and motors, there’s very little empty space. The phone doesn’t flex or twist like many modern glass sandwiches. It’s rigid and robust. In fact, it survives the bend test without cracking. That’s more than we can say for some production foldables.
You can watch the full teardown and durability test — it’s a fascinating 20-minute deep dive into a piece of smartphone history that almost was.
What the LG Rollable Means Today
Looking back from 2026, the smartphone landscape has become… predictable. Foldables are mainstream now, with Samsung, Google, and OnePlus offering book-style and flip phones. But the crease remains a compromise. Transparent displays haven’t materialized. Rollable concepts have surfaced from Oppo and TCL, but none have reached consumers. LG’s Rollable remains the only fully functional, mass-producible rollable smartphone ever built.
It’s a bittersweet legacy. LG’s mobile division was never profitable for long, but it was endlessly creative. The Rollable sits alongside the Nexus 4’s iridescent back, the HTC One M8’s duo camera, and the Essential Phone’s magnetic accessories as a reminder that innovation doesn’t always come from the market leader. Sometimes it comes from the underdog willing to take a risk.
For now, the LG Rollable lives on in a handful of employee units, a few review samples, and now, immortalized on YouTube. If you’re a fan of weird, wonderful gadgets, this teardown is essential viewing. It’s a look at a parallel universe — one where LG didn’t give up, and we all got to carry a little piece of rolling magic in our pockets.
Have you ever owned an LG smartphone? Which experimental design was your favorite? Let us know in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe for more deep dives into forgotten tech.