Buried within Reuters interview with Yoon Han-kil, Samsung’s Senior Vice President of Product Strategy, which revealed to us the company’s faith in its S5 sales, upcoming Tizen smartphones and Android Wear plans, was an interesting nugget about the next generation Galaxy Note sporting a “new form factor.”

Those three words are all that Yoon said about the matter, but they’re enough to send us on a journey of wild speculations. What exactly does “new form factor” imply? Is it a radical change from the current touchscreen slab that we are used to, or a small modification of it?

Among the most likely options we can think of are a flexible display and water-resistance. Water and dust-resistance are pretty much a given with the next Note based on recent rumors and the fact that Samsung almost always carries the S lineup’s new features to the following device in the Note series. However, these options would hardly warrant a “new form factor” moniker. The more interesting speculation is in regards to curved and bent displays.

As a matter of fact, Samsung already released the Galaxy Round and the Gear Fit, both devices using flexible displays, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that the company has enough faith in its technology and production scale to go with it on a flagship device. If that turns out to be true though, it will be interesting to see if the Note will sport a convex display like the Galaxy Round or the rumored Note 3 variant that we saw many months ago, or most likely, a concave one à-la-Gear-Fit with a wrap-around screen reaching out to the border to show notifications from all angles.

The second option might have more grounds in Samsung’s own patent application and its CES 2013 Youm (video below) prototype. Moreover, Bloomberg also reported that Samsung would be launching bent three-side screened devices in the second half of 2014, a date that aligns very well with the expected release of the next Galaxy Note. Mix all of these facts and rumors together, and you get why we’re leaning toward the three-sided display as the “new form factor” of the Galaxy Note.

As we mentioned in the title of this post, all of this is speculation, so we’ll sit tight and wait for more details and leaks to appear before the next Note is officially unveiled.