At Samsung’s earnings call, the company announced intentions to introduce phones with flexible displays as early as 2012.

“The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part,” said spokesman Robert Yi during an earnings call. “The application probably will start from the handset side.”

He went on to say that the flexible screens would start appearing in tablets and other devices following their debut in smartphones.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that we’ve heard about the flexible display technology – it’s been around for awhile. Various prototypes have been shown off by a number of companies in the past few years, including Samsung itself. Here’s an demo of Samsung’s flexible AMOLED display at the 2011 CES show –

Samsung is not the only one demoing this technology, but it’s interesting that they have come out and definitively said that flexible display phones would be hitting the market in early 2012.

In September, a concept-phone called the Samsung Galaxy Skin made the round on the interwebs. The Galaxy Skin was a super-thin device that could be bent – and nearly rolled. There were conflicting reports as to whether the phone actually existed in prototype form, or if it was simply a concept. Samsung told CNET that Samsung wasn’t involved in the product, it was just a theoretical design that was stamped with the Samsung name to make it look legit.

But Samsung is now saying that these flexible phones will arrive in 2012. Whether they have anything to do with this “Skin” concept is yet to be determined.

Here are some other example of flexible display technology, from other sources.

Here’s Nokia demoing a flexible device at Nokia World –

And here’s Toshiba, with a flexible LCD display –

Would you buy a flexible phone? What does the technology have to offer? Let us know in the comments.