TL;DR
- The teased (but never released) LG rollable phone just showed up on YouTube.
- The phone looks and functions a lot like the Oppo rollable.
- The phone landed just as LG was winding down operations, so it never stood a chance.
At CES 2021, LG teased an upcoming smartphone. In the image above, you can see a phone that starts out as a “normal” phone but then rolls out into a larger form factor.
However, not long afterward, LG announced it was completely exiting the smartphone industry. As such, we never actually saw the LG rollable hit the market.
See also: Everything you need to know about LG
Now, though, we have the next-best thing: someone got their hands on an unreleased version of this phone and uploaded a brief hands-on video to YouTube. You can check out the full video below.
In the video, you can see the LG rollable roll-in and roll-out. It appears to work both with an icon on the display as well as some sort of hardware toggle. The phone itself also looks a bit thinner than the average “normal” smartphone, which is an interesting choice considering it doesn’t look much bigger than a normal phone when it’s rolled out.
The phone does appear to work, though. It doesn’t appear to have Google Play Services and the icons are all in Korean, but that’s not too surprising.
Considering we will never see this LG rollable on the market, this is as close as we’re going to get with experiencing what LG had in mind. However, Oppo did release its own rollable which made it a lot further along than LG’s version. So don’t write off rollables just yet.
