Huawei's new flagship Mate 40 series is expected to be released around October. Last year's Mate 30 series came with a number of innovative features, including a curved screen and virtual volume buttons that are Located on the edge of the screen, replacing the physical buttons.
According to Letsgodigital, on July 6, 2019, Huawei filed a design patent application with the State Intellectual Property Office and made it available to the public on June 16, 2020.
We know that the Huawei Mate 30 already supports a side-by-side virtual shutter feature, but this patent hints that the Huawei Mate 40 series might go a step further and integrate some other camera features to the side of the screen as well.
The patent includes about 10 production images and a brief description, as well as color images of the phone that suggest a modern-designed Huawei smartphone with a curved display and dual front-facing cameras with tiny dual camera modules.
The design patents mainly concern the user UI for the cameras, which is on the side of the edge screen. One set of UI schemes contains a number of virtual buttons for camera control, including icons for adjusting parameters (+ and -) , flash, filter selection and white balance settings.
It also includes a conversion icon to switch between the front and rear camera lenses, and the last icon is the shutter button.
There's also another set of options, starting with a parameter settings icon (+ and -), as well as HDR, flash, white balance, and gallery icons.
Huawei usually launches its Mate smartphones around September or October, and the exact release date for the Mate 40 series is still unknown, but it is expected to adopt a similar strategy.