Those bendable AMOLED displays Samsung showcased at CES may start appearing in mobile phones a lot sooner than expected, the Korean company said this week.

Remember Samsung's flexible AMOLED displays? The Korean tech giant gave us a sneak peek of the bendy screens in rigid mobile device cases at CES in January (video below) and now plans to use them in mobile phones that could be released in 2012, according to reports.

"The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part," Samsung's Robert Yi said during the company's recent earnings call, according to PCWorld. "The application probably will start from the handset side."

Yi said after Samsung launches flexible phones it would follow on with other devices like tablets featuring the technology.

Samsung had previously said it wouldn't be mass-producing devices with the flexible AMOLED screens until 2013 or 2014, according OLED-Info.com, which reckons that the first such products will feature fixed curves like the prototypes shown at CES rather than be truly bendable.

Meanwhile, Nokia has its own device prototype featuring a bendable screen called Kinetic, OLED-Info.com notes. It's a 4-inch device that can be bent and twisted to trigger zoom-ins on an image and other actions that may use an AMOLED panel sourced from Samsung or LG Electronics, another one of several Asia-based consumer electronics companies experimenting with flexible devices.

Samsung's star has risen in the mobile phone market in recent months, largely on the back of its . In the third quarter of this year, the company passed Apple to take the top spot in the global smartphone market in terms of unit shipments, according to by Strategy Analytics.

Samsung accounted for 23.8 percent of all smartphone shipments for the quarter while Apple controlled 14.6 percent of the market, the research firm said this week. Nokia, the smartphone market leader before Apple and Samsung passed it in the second quarter of 2011, remained in third place.

Samsung shipped 27.8 million of its Google Android-based smartphones in the third quarter, while Apple shipped 17.1 million of its iPhones. Apple's iPhone line may have been affected by customers putting off purchases in anticipation for the company's new iPhone 4S which was released earlier this month, according to Strategy Analytics.

In the overall global handset market, which includes feature phones and smartphones, Nokia remained the top manufacturer, with Samsung second, according to a separate research report by IDC that was also issued this week.