When it comes to off-roading, some challenges can be presented that you might not expect. Often, even if your bumpers clear a ditch or ravine you're driving through, the exhaust tip will scrape. The exhaust tip is typically one of the lowest hanging components near the vehicle's bumper, and they end up dented.
When the first modern, fully-featured smartwatches launched almost eight years ago, they were mostly ridiculed for the need to recharge on a daily basis. Even Apple's first Apple Watch got a lot of flak for that, and the smartwatch industry hasn't exactly made leaps in battery life. Mirroring the smartphone market, smartwatch makers have resorted to indirect strategies to either reduce power consumption or speed up charging, but a Samsung patent wants to make that moot by having the smartwatch constantly charging even while on your wrist.
The Galaxy Z Fold 3's adoption of S Pen and Wacom technologies was widely praised, but its treatment of the stylus received the completely opposite feedback. Sold separately and without any home for it on the device, some regarded the S Pen as an optional afterthought rather than a selling feature. The balance between having a thin device and a comfortable stylus has always been a delicate dance, but a new Samsung patent plays around with the idea of a foldable device that does have room for the S Pen in a rather intriguing way.
One thing that smartphone users all have in common is that they want the most screen space possible in the given limitations of a particular form factor. What that means is, whatever size the smartphone happens to be, we want as much screen as possible and no notch. Typically, cameras and other sensors are hidden within a notch, consuming screen space that could otherwise be used for video or images, among other things.
Microsoft's window of opportunity to push dual-screen devices to the mainstream market may have now passed. Even disregarding the Android-based Surface Duo and its canceled Surface Neo, the manufacturers like ASUS and Lenovo that flaunted such futuristic computers have largely gone silent on that matter. It isn't just PC makers, however, who have had thoughts on dual-screen computers, and Apple's newly-awarded MacBook patent show the possibilities of such a device, presuming they ever got built and sold.
It isn't often we talk about patents for video game mechanics, but today EA is giving us a pretty good reason to. Electronic Arts announced this morning that it's making several patents centered around accessibility free to use for all game developers. EA says that it's making these patents royalty-free through a program called the "Patent Pledge."
In Europe, there are a lot of cars available that we can't get in the States. Often these cars the US is denied our cool sports cars or wagons. However, one of the Ford models that we can't get stateside, at least for now, is a version of the Transit van called the Ford Transit Trail.
More than a year ago, speaker company Sonos filed a lawsuit against Google, seeking to have certain Google products blocked from import into the US over alleged patent infringement. Fast-forward several months and a preliminary finding on the matter has been revealed: the ITC has sided with Sonos, but this is only an initial decision.
The end of the unexpectedly cracked iPhone display glass may soon be at hand. A couple of inventors including Prashant Mandlik, Bhadrinarayana Lalgudi Visweswaran, Izhar Z Ahmed and others have drawn up plans for a electronic device display that utilizes a crack detection resistor. Can you imagine an iPhone with the ability to detect a crack in its own display glass, potentially before it becomes enough of an issue that it could slice your skin?
A new Vivo patent has turned up that shows a strange and very unique pop-up camera system that may find a home in future smartphones. The patent shows cascading extendable camera with four lenses that pop out the top of the smartphone. Each of the four segments of the pop-up camera has its own lens inside.
Microsoft's new Surface could adopt a very different screen hinge design, with newly-spotted patents suggesting the company is flirting with an iPad Pro-style floating hinge. Currently, the Surface Book has a detachable screen - which pulls away from the keyboard to form a standalone tablet - while the Surface Laptop adopts a more traditional notebook form-factor.
Many use their smartphones to capture anything anywhere, sometimes even in difficult or dangerous locations and positions. One thing our powerful smartphones will never be able to do is to take aerial photos, at least not without some help from a drone or any other flying contraption. Never say never, as they say, and Vivo seems to be thinking of something to solve that problem. Its latest patent shows a smartphone that houses an honest-to-goodness quadcopter drone to take pictures from above, almost like in the movies.