Just before LG ended its smartphone ambitions for good, it launched the LG Wing. But there was another, more creative phone waiting — the LG Rollable. We’ve seen glimpses of it over the years, but a proper, comprehensive look at the device has remained elusive.
The previous sentence implies the existence of an ‘Until now’ follow-up, and that’s just what we’ve got. YouTuber JerryRigEverything has posted a teardown of the LG phone that never saw proper daylight. Even in 2026, the Rollable phone is a very advanced piece of tech.
Rollable rewind
The main innovation of the phone, which accounts for its name, was that the display could get longer. LG’s frame was capable of expanding, unrolling more of the flexible display for users. When the phone wasn’t expanded — presumably so you could catch up on your streaming backlog — the display wrapped around the back of the phone. There, it acted as a secondary display for things like notifications.
JerryRigEverything took the phone apart, showing the mechanisms used by LG to achieve this effect. A pair of motors and a spring assembly allowed the chassis to separate without mucking with the internals. It would probably have been a repair store’s nightmare, however.
Even so, this level of innovation was almost unheard of in 2022 when LG shut its mobile division down. The LG Wing, which Stuff tested, was also an interesting character. A tee-shaped smartphone that rotated into a regular rectangle when you were done with widescreen use? It’s never been done since, and perhaps with good reason, because the Wing didn’t sell well. But if LG had been allowed to continue making wacky smartphones like the Rollable and Wing? Who knows what we would have in our pockets in 2026?
