LG has announced that its G Flex handset will be coming to European shores in December once it has officially launched in its homeland on November 12.

The company says that Orange France will be the first network operator to start offering the phone — which curves from top to bottom and is therefore not to be confused with Samsung’s Galaxy Round, which curves from side to side — outside South Korea, and it will go on sale in time for Christmas.

So far, there’s no word on how much the device will cost early adopting Europeans but LG has confirmed that in Korea it will go on sale for 999,900 Won — that’s about €700.

Flexible display technology could prove revolutionary: if a screen can be bent in half or rolled into a cylinder, then companies will no longer be confined to building rigidly square or rectangular devices.

It would also mean that tablets could have massive 20-inch screens, but then neatly fold up to be easily carried in a handbag. That’s a vision of the future. In the present, because batteries, camera lenses, and processors are still distinctly rigid, all that’s possible are the curved handsets that LG and Samsung have just launched.

The LG G Flex uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor found in the Samsung Galaxy Note III and LG’s own less flexible G2 flagship — so it won’t be lacking for speed or multitasking performance. It also has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a less than full HD, 720p display.

However, what it loses in resolution, it makes up for in Terminator-esque self-healing properties. Thanks to a special coating on its case, surface scratches on its sides and rear should magically disappear.