Patent - SlashGear

Posts Tagged ‘patent’

New Apple Patent could take control of your volume knob on your iPod

By James Allan Brady on Monday, Dec 24th 2007 No Comments

dlipod123 According to a new patent filed by Apple, the company is considering applying some software to your iPod that will gradually turn down the volume at which you listen to your iPod for you. Sure it’s for your safety, but when you pay for a product, you don’t want the company’s software coming in and saying you’ve had it on max volume for too long.

I rarely have reason to crank my iPod Touch above about 50% volume provided I am using one of my good sets of headphones, heck, provided I am using headphones at all. I have a few devices that I connect my iPod to via the headphone jack that give me better audio if I crank up the volume on the iPod to 100%, that doesn’t mean I am listening to my iPod at 100% of the volume, what about then?

Sure, you can go deaf from listening to your iPod too loud for too long, and Apple has implemented optional measures for those too dumb to turn it down before they go deaf, but implementing mandatory measures such as these just to keep from getting sued is dumb. Especially if Apple is going to continue supplying crappy ear buds with their players that require you to crank up the volume to get any semblance of sound quality.

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Rumor: Blackberry Touchscreen 1.0 and Pearl 2.0 coming soon?

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Dec 21st 2007 1 Comment

So this report from Research GMP Securities adds a lot of weight to this rumor, but its been around for so long that I am keeping it on rumor status until I see the damn thing. Nonetheless the people at GMP are reporting that they were shown exhibits from a couple different patent applications, the first a touchscreen Blackberry, the second a new Pearl.

blackberry touch screen

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New Nokia Patent is promising

By James Allan Brady on Monday, Dec 3rd 2007 No Comments

My god, Nokia Patents and Asus Eee PC news are about on par with each other this past couple of weeks. The difference between this patent and all the others is that this one depicts a phone I might actually buy.

nokia nseries 8 megapixel imaging slider

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Patent leak: is this Nokia’s next iteration of their internet tablet?

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Nov 23rd 2007 No Comments

Judging from the pictures, without being given any size numbers, it looks like it could be their next internet tablet. The patent is dated November 8th, this year, and there aren’t any details as to whether it’s a Symbian OS or Maemo based device.

nokiapatent

It does appear to have a camera and a touch screen from the patent application, those two things alone will probably net it a spot in the N-Series of Nokia devices. Although, it looks like, if it were small enough, that Nokia might be making the next Sidekick?

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Nokia patents dual screen clamshell phone

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Nov 23rd 2007 No Comments

Nokia’s ugliest idea for a phone yet, it’s an egregiously mis-proportioned device featuring dual screens, one or both of them presumable being a touch screen. It looks like they took an N800, thinned it down a bit, and put a giant crease in the middle.

nokia clamshell touchscreen patent

Dual screens aren’t new, and the only way you could get by with such an ugly design is to either make it into a gaming system (DS anyone?) or to pack this thing full of features. The LG Venus is the first phone I’ve seen that had dual screens, and I haven’t held or seen it myself, but I wasn’t too impressed by its appearance.

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Microsoft patents look unchangingly like the iPhone interface

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Oct 12th 2007 2 Comments

Sure, there are slight differences, and maybe they add up to enough of a difference for a lawsuit to not be possible, but it looks almost exactly the same. The patents were filed in July, shortly after the release of the iPhone, coincidence? I think not.

msoftpatent

We could see it in a new Zune Phone, maybe the next version of Windows Mobile, so the iPhones competitors can come out with something that truly looks and works almost exactly like the iPhone. That’s probably the only way they’ll give the iPhone any competition is to copy it almost exactly.

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Google datacenter-in-a-box patented

By James Allan Brady on Wednesday, Oct 10th 2007 No Comments

Well its not really in a box, its in a shipping container. Furthermore, its not all that new, I read about it way back when they hired the first couple of engineers specifically for this project.

It was rumored at the time that Google was buying up all the “Dark Fiber” out there and that they might be working towards creating their own Internet. That might still happen, but I doubt it, anyways, they finally patented the damn thing.

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Patent shows that Apple may be working on a UMPC or small tablet

By Chris on Tuesday, Sep 4th 2007 1 Comment

Could Apple be working on a smaller UMPC or tablet to be released sometime in the future? If I had a nickel every time someone asked that I’d probably be rich. However, a recently discovered patent filed by the Cupertino-based company shows that they may be doing just that.

RAM slot

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Apple Collapsible Ports

By James Allan Brady on Friday, Aug 17th 2007 No Comments

So, Apple goes and files a patent for collapsible ports (USB, FireWire, etc, you get the idea). Now everyone is talking ultra-portable, ultra mobile, its just ridiculous that at the first sign of a cool feature that just so happens to save space, they are conspiring to make a new device.

Since when have “Apple” and “Innovation” become so distant that something so small all of the sudden means a new device, could it be that maybe Apple just had a good idea and though about leveraging on their current products to make them thinner, more sleek, better looking?

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Apple patents show touch-interfaces continue to top agenda

By Chris Davies on Thursday, Jul 5th 2007 1 Comment

It’s nice to see that despite wowing crowds with the iPhone Apple aren’t resting on their laurels. New patents have shown up that range from the vaguely dull – a hold switch that activates automatically when it gets dark – to the more interesting, such as short-range information exchange that could be used in wireless payment systems or proximity detecting. They’ve also patented the iChat speech bubble interface, which shows up with a three-way conversation in the documentation.

Apple iChat patent diagram