A rotary wheel on the camera: Huawei Mate 40 to feature a round touch display?

Huawei tends to reserve cutting-edge hardware for its Mate series, but this one would be quite there even by Mate series standards. Following on from the removal of the volume rocker on the Mate 30 Pro, it seems that Huawei is experimenting with including a secondary display for its successor.

Spotted at the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) by LetsGoDigital, Huawei has patented a display that runs around a rear-facing camera housing. The device pictured looks unmistakably like the Mate 30 Pro, giving rise to the idea that Huawei will include the technology in its successor.

The patent describes several uses for the display, on which LetsGoDigital has based several renders. As the images below demonstrate, the touchscreen panel could either be used as a secondary display or for gestures.

In our opinion, the implementation of a quasi-rotary dial would be a better solution than the capacitive volume rocker that Huawei includes in the Mate 30 Pro. The other gestures shown below look genuinely useful too, as does the option of using the screen as a secondary display when your phone is face-down. While patent filings are no guarantee of something making its way to market, including such technology in the Mate 40 Pro would help differentiate it from its peers.