Patents

Leave it to Apple to creatively think of ways to send me to the edge of my seat! Amongst some of the most recent patents that Apple has submitted, a few caught my eye and just might catch yours as well.

Unwired View has highlighted some pretty cool features that Apple filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

First cool feature: Facial Detection. Like the cool Proximity feature we have today on our iPhones, a camera (mounted on the front I presume) will determine that a user is present. It is rather anoying when you are viewing an article and the screen dims and shuts off. This patent will help with that. It is also suggested that this camera can block or deny access to certain applications using recognition. Our iPhones will know who we are!

The next neat feature that you may find on the next iPhone is voice modulation. At first, I was thinking of ways I could change my voice for conversations with other people while I was on the phone with. That would be fun, but I don’t think that would fly over very… more...

Daniel Eran Dilger is full of righteous indignation about the attacks of Apple’s multitouch patent. You know, the idea that either Apple doesn’t really own the patent or that there was some prior art that negates the patent. Mr. Dilger lays is out right away:

According to a wide range of frothy mouthed pundits, Apple has announced patented ownership of “multitouch,” and will now destroy the future we deserve by forcing all competitors to stop using a basic concept that was already in wide use long before Apple ever demonstrated the iPhone. They’re wrong, here’s why.

And it just gets better from there. Roughly Drafted takes a bevy of claims about multitouch as reported by bloggers and dissects them thoroughly. Along the way he manage to work in Saturday Night Live (the 70s version) and Apple’s legal troubles with Microsoft back in the day. It’s a well done article and worth your time.

A new patent application from Apple has been published by the US Patent and Trademark Office showing that they are considering linking the functionality between the Maps, GPS, and Calendar apps on the iPhone.

One cool feature that the patent mentions is the ability to trigger alarms to tell someone they’re going to be late based on how long it will take to reach a destination. These alarms could then be linked to send messages to either confirm an appointment or notify someone that the iPhone’s owner will be late to the meeting. Pretty cool, eh?

In addition, the technology would let users view an address associated with a calendar event in the Maps app. Other uses include using the map to mark a rout between several events on the same day, including travel time estimates.

Of course, don’t get too excited. It’s just an idea for now.

Via: MacNN

A new patent application by Apple reveals that Apple has been working on the ability for iPhone and iPod touch owners to wirelessly stream content from their at home iTunes library for use on the road.

iPhone or iPod touch owners must selectively sync content from their Mac or PC’s iTunes library. This transfers those items to the mobile device for later playback. Apple is proposing that mobile device owners could instead access their entire collection over Wi-Fi or cellular networks:

New versions iTunes and the iPhone Software could theoretically eliminate this problem by syncing only the metadata—or tiny files containing the barebones attributes of each media item or playlist but not the content itself—from a user’s iTunes library to their portable devices.

This is all done by using metadata. Appleinsider reports: “Using this metadata, iPhones and iPods would contain “virtual media items” representing every playlist, video, photo, and mobile game stored on their computer, even if the sum of those files would ordinarily be too large to fit onto the devices’ hard disk drive or flash drive. This is possible because metadata capable of representing a media item… more...