LG will be shutting its mobile phone business, so these phones won’t see the light of day.
What you need to know
- The LG V70 and Rollable phone have leaked on the web.
- The leaks appear to be a mix of regulatory images and live prototype models.
- Neither phone will be released following the shuttering of LG’s mobile phone business.
LG’s now-canceled Rollable phone has shown up on the web alongside the LG V70. These images come from Twitter user FrontTron, via XDA Developers. Both phones would have launched later this year had the company not opted to shutter their mobile phone business, continuing the company’s strings of ambitious releases.
Starting from the V70, codenamed Rainbow, it’s visually similar to last year’s LG Velvet. The company had opted to adopt a more modern design, one that would look less workmanlike than the previous G and V Series. To all accounts, it succeeded.
Writing for Android Central, Alex Dobie praised the design, commenting:
The Velvet is probably the best-looking phone LG has ever produced. While there’s not a whole lot of room left to make a glass and metal rectangle stand out from the crowd, LG’s new phone is pleasing to the eyes, comfortable to hold, and significantly less slippery than some of the company’s other models.
We don’t know a lot more about the phone, other than it would have come with high-mid range specs, so think the base OnePlus 9 rather than the Galaxy S21. It probably would be a very good Android phone, but LG’s rivals simply make better ones.
The Rollable on the other hand follows in the style of the LG Wing. It would have continued LG’s way of doing foldables without being like all the other phone makers. It’s not clear how practical it would have been when released, but it would have gathered up headlines and been an interesting curio. The image doesn’t show much other than the curved screen and camera, but looking like an average phone while all rolled up would have been part of its charm.
LG’s phones often veered into the experimental and deeply strange, so a rollable phone like the one pictured above isn’t a shock. The V70 was more subdued, but LG has been doing subdued for years and it hasn’t worked out.
In the end, LG didn’t think either of these phones would be enough to put their business back on the profitable side of things. Seeing as the Wing and the Velvet essentially acted as precursors to these two, they didn’t need a Daniel to read the writing on the balance sheet.
