Nokia patents active bezels for phones and tablets

A patent belonging to Nokia reveals that the Finnish based manufacturer might soon offer active bezels in future models of its Nokia Lumia smartphones and tablets. To increase the size of the touch-sensitive area of a device, Nokia's idea is to make the bezels respond to touch input. You probably are asking yourself how could this be done? Considering how often a device user touches the bezels on a device, wouldn't this lead to a number of accidental touches?

According to the patent, Nokia has solved this problem by making the bezels active only after the user presses down on part of the bezel with a force that would exceed a predetermined amount. This would allow the phone or tablet to know that the user wishes to interact using touch input on that part of the device. A visual indication or haptic feedback could be used to let the user know that the bezels are active.


The active bezels could be disabled by merely allowing it to be active for a certain period of time. The patent even goes as far as saying that the amount of time that the bezels remain active could correspond with the amount of force used to enable the feature in the first place.

via: NPU