The evolution of our mobile devices lives a struggle between the functional and the aesthetic. We are seeing how manufacturers have managed to push the screens to the edges, even if that means drilling holes in the screens to house the selfie sensor, while the use of the camera under the screen is debugged and widespread. Another of the leaps that it seems, the industry will give, is the elimination of physical buttons such as the power button.
This aesthetic struggle is also experiencing its particular battle between a thinner design, more or less battery or the 3.5 jack that is in danger of extinction. Everything indicates that the future will go with a flexible sheet, moldable to the desired size and that it will have multiple sensors to activate many of its functions including on and off.
A future without physical buttons
Remember that making physical buttons disappear is not something new. Last year’s Huawei Mate 30 Pro, despite all the veto obstacles that the company suffers, can be considered to some extent ahead of its time. The terminal has a Horizon Display screen with 88 degree curved glass, which has allowed it to dispense with the volume up / down buttons in favor of virtual controls.
We know that companies like Foxconn, the largest manufacturer of electronic components in the world, is immersed in the development of “SDS Buttonbar” technology, a solution that eliminates physical buttons in favor of virtual buttons.
How to make it possible in today’s Huawei?
However, while we wait for the future to take place, today there are methods to dispense with the on-off button on our Huawei mobile. These tricks will allow us to interact with our terminal in a different way, while reducing button wear. Thanks to some features present in EMUI, we can stop touching this button forever.
Screen lock
One of the actions that most require touching the “power” button is to proceed with the automatic blocking of our mobile. In order to avoid this, we will have the option of adding a screen lock widget to the terminal, which will allow us to lock the mobile phone with a single touch on the desktop.
To activate it, we will have to be on the desktop of our mobile and hold down any free area to bring up the desktop editing screen. Then we will click on Widgets and select the screen lock button, which we must release in a free space on the desktop.
Wake up the screen
Once we have a method to lock the mobile without having to touch the power button , we will have to find a method to do the opposite: wake up the screen. In this case, we will have to have some method configured to be able to wake her up and then unlock our mobile, that is, with the fingerprint, the pin or the face unlock.
Then we will have to activate the options to wake up the mobile with the double tap on the screen or with the gesture of lifting the device. A combination that tends to do very well is to lift the device with facial recognition active, so the mobile will be unlocked without touching anything.
To activate these modes we have to go to Settings / Accessibility Functions / Shortcuts and Gestures / Activate Screen. Once inside we enable the options “Raise to activate” and “Press twice to activate”
Schedule power on and off
The last obstacle that we find to be able to totally do without the power button , is the fact of turning off the terminal completely. In this case, we should make use of the power button to leave it pressed and select the option to “Turn off”. Luckily, we can always program the automatic on and off of our Huawei.
We can do it from Settings / Accessibility functions / On and Off. Once inside, we can program our terminal to turn itself off and on automatically between specific hours. It is a veteran function that allows, for example, to make the mobile turn off at bedtime, and turn on only in the morning.