Look at This Crazy LG Rollable Phone (Updated)

LG really wants nothing to do with foldables, even as Samsung has shown no signs of backing away from the idea. Instead, LG has already released their weird flippable Wing phone as an alternative, but their next play is where things get weirder and possibly more awesome.

The LG Rollable is the new phone to come out of LG’s “exploratory” lab that takes out-of-the-box ideas and tries to turn them into real products you might buy. The LG Wing was the first and now they are following up with Rollable.

As the name suggests, LG is using its rollable display technology to create a phone that starts out as a somewhat normal-shaped phone, but it can then expand or resize by unrolling to turn into a mini tablet. It then rolls the display back up to return to its original form. It looks like magic, since the display grows and shrinks with content on it, but again, this is a similar idea to the rollable LG TV that was the story of last year’s CES.

LG teased the Rollable today during their CES 2021 keynote, which we’ve captured for you below.

Does this idea make sense? I think so. The Galaxy Fold 2 is such a great device because it doubles as both high-end phone and perfectly-sized mini tablet. The issues with the Fold 2 are that it’s stupidly heavy and bulky and you have to physically unfold it. This LG Rollable could get rid of all of those problems, since it doesn’t need to fold and instead does all of the heavy lifting (interally) for you, while giving you both phone and tablet.

We don’t know if or when LG might consider releasing this device, but we’ll certainly try to take one for a spin.

• UPDATE: LG told Nikkei that the Rollable will be released at some point in 2021.