LG’s ignoble exit from the smartphone business made headlines last month. But an international electronics giant doesn’t simply flip a switch and exit a market: there were plenty of in-development phones still floating around LG offices and factories when it decided to stop making them. According to one noted leaker, the company is selling off the last Android phones it will ever make straight to its employees.
FrontTron posted one such example to Twitter, alleging that the unreleased LG Velvet 2 Pro, AKA the LG Rainbow, is being sold to LG Electronics Korea employees for approximately $176 each. That’s an absolute steal for a flagship device with a Snapdragon 888 processor and equivalent specs elsewhere, though employees are only guaranteed six months of warranty service (possibly as much as 24) and zero, count ’em, zero software updates.
LG Rainbow (LG Velvet 2 Pro)
SD888
6.8″ FHD+ OLED 120Hz
8/128
4500mAhLimited 3000 unit sales delayed due to high popularity and discussing extending warranty from 6 months to 24 months
Only LG Electronics Korea employees can buy max 2 units per person
Resale prohibited$176 pic.twitter.com/478IMUbgj7
— Tron ❂ (@FrontTron) May 17, 2021
According to the leak, 3000 phones are being made available to employees with a limit of two per person, absolutely no reselling allowed. (We’ll see about that — this kind of thing is the stuff of eBay legends, either now or years down the line.) The exact status of the sale isn’t nailed down, as it’s presumably very hush-hush per LG policy. The company may have temporarily halted it due to massive demand, even within its own ranks. According to LG’s promotional material from 2019, LG Electronics employs over 70,000 people in South Korea alone.
What of the LG Rollable? At one point it was set to be the LG’s answer to the new crop of folding phones, upon which it would pin its hopes for the future of the company’s mobile efforts. According to FrontTron, that too was considered for sale to employees, restricted to the far-smaller Mobile Communications division, though numbers, prices, and specs for that aren’t known. It’s just faintly possible that you could get your hands on one someday, after it’s passed through several others.
