Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. may be bringing bendable smartphones to market as soon as 2017, according to one report Monday.

Bloomberg, referencing “people familiar with the matter,” wrote that one model is said to fold in half, while another has a 5-inch display that “unfurls” into a tablet-sized 8-inch panel.

Both phones could debut at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona next February.

The initiative to build the new bendable phones is said to be called “Project Valley”, a push by Samsung to bring new, more innovative devices to market in a showdown with Apple, who is rumored to be preparing to launch bezel-less smartphone designs in 2017.

“This product could be a game-changer if Samsung successfully comes up with a user interface suitable for bendable screens,” IBK Securities Co. analyst Lee Seung Woo told Bloomberg. “Next year is a probable scenario. Their biggest obstacle was related to making transparent plastics and making them durable, which seems resolved by now.”

Changing lineup

The move to introduce phones with bendable screens may be part of a broader shakeup of Samsung’s device range, with the report going on to claim that the next version of the Samsung Galaxy Note may be known as the Note 7 instead of the Note 6 to bring it into line with Samsungs’s flagship Galaxy S range; the new bendable phones though will not be sold under the Galaxy S name and will instead be given new, premium names.

Samsung itself has theoretically had the technology to make a “flexible” phone since it announced in 2014 it had mastered the manufacture of Graphene, a material that if implemented properly could allow for the deployment of such phones.

Material, though, isn’t the only limiting factor: just because you have found a way to manufacture Graphene doesn’t necessarily mean it can immediately be applied to every aspect of a phone, and in Samsung’s case that would require making most of the components flexible to allow for a bendable phone.

That said, we know Samsung has been working on implementing this technology for years now, so don’t be the least be surprised that we’ll likely definitely see some amazing new phones come from the South Korean giant in the not too distant future.

Image credit: meharris/Wikimedia Commons/CC by 3.0