A recently discovered Huawei patent has revealed that Huawei seems to be planning on making a touch-sensitive bezel for smartwatches. In many of the figures in the gallery below you can see the diagrams depicting a user interacting with the bezel of the watch for some kind of function, and although the diagrams showing the fingers touching the watch don’t actually explain any of the interactivity features, one of the figures does explain in somewhat minor detail that the user could use a series of different gesture interactions to initiate some sort of task or action on the watch bezel.
For example, in the very first figure in the gallery, the drawings of the interaction with the bezel are accompanied by descriptions of various gestures, with certain gestures broken up into different zones. The thumb zone would allow for the user to use gestures like a swipe left or right, but users would also be able to click that section of the bezel like a button, as well as use a pressure sensitive force sensing touch for an additional action type. The index zone would include the same thing, while the thumb and index zones together would allow for a completely different set of actions, such as swiping the index finger up on the bezel while the thumb swipes left at the same time, which would allow the user to zoom in on stuff, presumably a picture or maybe directions via a mapping application. Additionally reversing the direction of those simultaneous gestures would zoom out.
The same diagram also explains how the bezel would rotate, not unlike how Samsung has implemented this on the Gear S3 and Gear Sport smartwatches. It’s possible that these could be designs for Huawei’s next version of the Huawei Watch, which would be the third model for its Android Wear lineup. None of the diagrams explain what any of these gestures would actually do other than zoom in and out, but quite likely the swipe gestures to the left or right or up and down would be for scrolling, and the clicking and force sensitivity would likely be for selecting things or opening up applications on the watch, which would make it possible to forego using the touch display almost entirely if you wanted to. Whether or not Huawei ends up implementing any of these gestures or features in its next watch is unclear at this point, but it would be one of the more interesting smartwatches should it surface as an available device later on.
