Never released LG Rollable smartphone reveals innovative internals in teardown video

In a way, 2021 marked the end of exciting smartphone designs, and LG previously produced plenty of them. One of the company’s last smartphones, the LG Wing, was not a commercial success, but it showed the South Korean company’s innovative streak before its mobile division was shut down shortly afterward. Just before that happened, however, LG engineers were still working on another innovation that made it to the brink of mass production but unfortunately never reached the market: the LG Rollable. The first smartphone with a rollable display was still produced in very small numbers and then distributed to LG employees, which later led to reviews appearing online in 2022.

As far as we know, though, there was never a proper teardown, which is no surprise. Few people would risk potentially damaging such a rare product by taking it apart. Now, four years later, we are finally getting a look inside the fascinating internals of the first, and so far only, rollable device that actually ended up in the hands of at least some users. In a teardown video on the JerryRigEverything YouTube channel, we can see how the flexible OLED display rolls out and retracts from the outside and also how the process works internally.

To make that happen, LG uses a combination of two motors and a spring mechanism made up of three arms, ensuring that all the internal electronics move evenly. When retracted, the rolled-up section of the OLED display disappears behind a transparent glass panel and serves as a kind of status display or secondary rear display, including for selfie previewing with the main camera. We have not seen this much innovation from any other manufacturer lately, especially in a device that has apparently remained fully functional for five years. Check out the video below to find out whether the LG Rollable survives the teardown: