Phones Stopped Getting Better: The LG Rollable Story

[00:00] I have ever gotten my hands on. that never saw the light of day until now. This, my friends, is the LG Rollable.

[00:15] And there is quite the story why it ultimately failed, and how I got my hands on it. But that last one will not be spoken about in this video.

[00:30] For years, LG was one of the biggest competitors to Samsung. like the LG Wing which is actually a phone because I hosted the launch event for LG.

[00:44] Instead of being a folding phone, It is such a cool idea. is that at the very end of that launch event,

[00:57] (soft, mysterious music) saying that they hoped to release it by the end of the year.

[01:09] because just three months after CES, its mobile division. Well, as you can see, it wasn't just a concept.

[01:23] There are a couple of videos out there, But until very recently, none of these prototypes And while we were in the middle of working on this video,

[01:36] on a Rollable and he did a full breakdown But I want do something a little bit different. So let me give you a little tour of the LG Rollable.

[01:54] So it is a really weird phone. the more it kind of breaks my brain. it looks like a fairly standard early 2020 style flagship.

[02:08] is just the fact that you do have the curved edges, something like the S7 Edge. you can see it's actually like fairly chunky.

[02:21] And on the back, that's where it looks super wacky. So the way it works is if you tap and hold the button, This hardware, this prototype

[02:33] was somewhere between like six and maybe up to nine months So clearly it was not finished by any means. this was actually fairly close

[02:46] that they would've done before actually shipping it. So on this side, there are volume rockers. I don't fully know why.

[02:59] So that does feel a little prototype-y to me it just vibrates the phone. When you open it up though,

[03:12] You can see that the Z Fold's a little bit wider, where you're getting like, I don't know, There is some kind of sensor built into the actual motor,

[03:26] so that if you try to, say, open the screen and then squish it, yeah, it stops and rewinds and I don't wanna do that that many times

[03:39] is if we do a little three finger on it, and of course roll it to the back, right? is actually now protected.

[03:53] underneath an existing panel of glass. I like the little split keyboard when you open it up. to like if you're typing on like a Fold or something.

[04:07] so actually pretty good. Shall we open up the YouTube app? So you put them side by side, if we expand them,

[04:21] I mean, you can see just how much bigger the screen is here Wow, okay. a run for its money.

[04:35] (phone humming euphorically) like that's legitimately really cool. I have some thoughts.

[04:49] that living with a five-year-old prototype phone So first things first, So I ended up tethering it to my Fold 7.

[05:03] that my foldable was supporting my Rollable. I would just do this all day long. It is the most lovely sound ever.

[05:18] I mean the screen is not like massively bright or anything, it is the most reflective surface known to mankind.

[05:30] maybe they would've put a film or something on it. But for the most part the phone works well. but like it's, it-

[05:42] I will say that the rollability of the phone itself Everyone I've showed this phone to "Oh my god, that's a magic folding phone,

[05:54] "What the heck?" Now, on paper, going from 7.4 to 6.8 inches But in practice, (laughing).

[06:09] doesn't sound like a big difference. you are looking at roughly three quarters of the size And the aspect ratio when it's expanded,

[06:24] which means the video really fills the screen nicely. when you're watching high quality Austin Evans productions. And I think that this is the real selling point

[06:37] With a foldable, the display is locked into two states, A Rollable can theoretically stop anywhere in between. It is such a cool idea

[06:52] But here's the thing, within an hour of using this phone, I found a scratch on the left edge of the display. that you can feel,

[07:06] you can really clearly tell I really don't understand how it happened. maybe a couple times to show people the mechanism

[07:18] The scratch is now permanent all the way down to the OLED. A foldable display is fragile too, protected by the actual phone chassis itself.

[07:33] it is always exposed. how you would ever put a screen protector on this. the idea that that screen has to be able to be flexible

[07:46] I just can't imagine that would hold up long term. It doesn't have a crease, which is great, where you can feel the roller mechanism underneath.

[08:00] as like one of those early creases in foldable phones, I mean, it just, it's like, bump, bump, bump, bump. That's, that doesn't show.

[08:12] My solar death ray shows you exactly where the lump is. of when Motorola rebooted the Razr back in 2019. But the big catch

[08:27] kind of product. It was like a little teardrop thing, for how expensive that phone was, even for 2019 standards.

[08:40] We're five, six generations later and the Razr works great. and the ultra thin glass. foldables are having a real mainstream moment right now.

[08:55] that no one has shipped a Rollable So in 2023, Ken and I got hands on that were around at the time, the Motorola Rizr,

[09:10] The Rizr is the one that goes like this. Now, I kind of think that because instead of going wider,

[09:24] It's a small phone that becomes a tall phone. very similar to the Rollable. with the Z Flip or the Razr.

[09:38] So here's the question I keep coming back to. Even if LG had shipped this, would it have even mattered? Honestly, maybe, but definitely not for LG.

[09:51] LG Mobile were over $4 billion in losses. out of 23 straight quarters of losses. They tried to sell the mobile division to Volkswagen

[10:07] As cool as it is, the Rollable was never going to fix that. is that the people who built this thing I mean, you look at that last stretch from LG

[10:22] and the hardware team were on a genuinely incredible run. The Wing was one of the most creative devices And the Rollable?

[10:34] to at least be that first generation Any flexible OLED screen has serious durability issues. that can handle being exposed to like pocket lint

[10:51] tens if not hundreds of thousands of times. that the Gorilla Glass on a normal smartphone will give you.

[11:04] I think this is the real answer It's not the motors or the mechanism that just hasn't caught up to what the rolly boy life needs.

[11:19] It is a genuine piece of history. And, yeah, it probably wouldn't have saved LG, that rollable phones could actually work.

[11:33] Now, this phone was never supposed to leave the building, It's a phone from an alternate timeline I mean, they didn't, but, man, they sure came close.

[11:48] (upbeat music)