Samsung is building a way to control your phone by touching its edges

A new Samsung patent may give insight into some of the innovations the company will look to introduce for future smartphones. The company patented a mechanism for controlling smartphone actions by pressing the edges of the phone.

The company details the use of “sensor pads” to detect touch, which we imagine are akin to capacitive surfaces that can sense your touch. This is opposed to going the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge route, where a curved AMOLED display can potentially serve as an “off-screen” secondary button area.

One neat use case for the technology is controlling a video game, as well as using the sensor pads as shutter buttons and settings control for the camera app. Samsung’s examples even talk about the possibility of the user customizing what the buttons do.

Using sensors embedded into a device’s bezel for secondary buttons is a much saner solution to the “not enough buttons” issue than slapping more actual buttons on the phone. It’s a neat innovation that would make us thankful for the bit of bezel still featured on today’s smartphones, and we hope Samsung can perfect the technology to get it into one of their devices in the near future.

[via Patently Mobile]