A lawsuit filed by Mirror Worlds LLC related to patents which they claim Apple infringes in Cover Flow has been successfully appealed. On Monday a federal judge overturned a jury’s verdict and ruled that Apple was not guilty of patent infringement, which could have cost the Cupertino company $625.5 million.
U.S District Judge Leonard Davis said that the evidence wasn’t enough to support the damage award:
“Mirror Worlds may have painted an appealing picture for the jury, but it failed to lay a solid foundation sufficient to support important elements it was required to establish under the law. The evidentiary record is insufficient to support the jury’s damage awards.”
When he first showed off OS X Lion last year, Steve Jobs explained Apple’s reluctance to add multitouch displays to their line of iMacs by saying that multitouch needed to be horizontal to be pleasant to use. Use it in a vertical position and you’re always leaning forward to poke and prod the screen, leading to what Steve Jobs calls “gorilla arm.” That’s why Apple has only brought multitouch to the Mac through peripherals like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Even so, some patents have shown up over the past year that suggest that Apple’s been experimenting with multitouch-capable iMacs with pivoting displays that pull down to a more appropriate horizontal orientation when a user wants to interact with on-screen elements directly.
If you want to see what such an iMac might look like in the flesh, though, check out HO’s latest TouchSmart PC. Look familiar? Yup, that’s right: it features a pull-down design that drops the multitouch display into a horizontal position to reduce arm fatigue… just like in Apple’s patent!
Hidden inside a sheathe of patents awarded to Apple today is a particularly interesting one that suggests that your future Mac just might be a slab of aluminum that glows.
If you look at the back of your MacBook, it’s pretty easy to piece together Apple’s current process in making the Apple logo glow. They carve a cut-out of the Apple logo in the MacBook lid, close it up with a sheet of opaque white plastic and when your display is on, the light leaking out causes the logo to emit light.
What Apple wants to do is make the logos and LED displays of future Macs glow without carving a hole in the aluminum. They basically want light-emitting logos and indicators to be invisible unless they are emitting light.
Steve Jobs has very clearly spelled out his feelings about multitouch on a desktop or laptop environment. Multitouch, in Apple’s view, is meant to be horizontal, not vertical, which is why you will never see a touchscreen iMac or MacBook. The Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad are Apple’s answer to the problem posed by desktop multitouch.
Makes sense to me. That said, the problem with even the Magic Trackpad is that it’s not real multitouch, in the sense that you are not directly interacting with a display with your fingers. Instead, you’re phoning what your fingers are doing to a connected display, the same as any mouse.
That’s clearly not as elegant a solution as Apple would like, so it’s no surprise to me that a new patent application spells out the possibility of a Magic Mouse with either an “OLED or specialized display surface made of collimated optical glass that contains a unique magnifying capability.”
A prototype fuel cell mobile phone by Hitachi. Apple may be working on similar technology for the iPhone and iPad. Photo: Slashphone
Apple has been granted its first patent related to Liquidmetal, a space-age metal alloy. But the patent isn’t for a new iPad enclosure or iPhone antenna, as experts have predicted. Instead Apple’s Liquidmetal patent is for an internal component of a fuel cell.
Last year, Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use the Liquidmetal Technologies’ IP in consumer electronic products. But of course, the ever-secretive company hasn’t hinted at its plans for the material. The possibilites are endless. Liquidmetal is a super lightweight, high-strength, scratch-proof metal that NASA says is “poised to redefine materials science as we know it in the 21st century.”
Eager to keep your nubile teenage daughter from using the new iPhone she got for Christmas as a sexting terminal? Cupertino’s just patented technology to keep her blossoming libido as virginal as the App Store.
Steve Jobs has made no bones about being skeptical in regards to multitouch displays on desktop and notebook Macs, observing that multitouch works best when a display is horizontal: anything else just leads to gorilla arm.
Right now, that means that Macs’ multitouch options are limited to accessories like the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad, but given the iPad’s success, it’s natural Apple is trying to find a more directly interactive approach to horizontal multitouch, in which the display can convert flush with a lap or a desk when it’s in touch mode.
Now a bevy of new patents have been awarded to Apple, most interestingly in a convertible MacBook-to-iPad-like device, spotted by Patently Apple.
The rationale behind Apple’s unibody aluminum housings isn’t just aesthetic appeal: it’s also sturdiness. Unibody aluminum adds a bit of heft to an ultra-thin Apple portable, but it makes that device also harder to break despite its thinness.
There’s always room for improvement though, and if a new patent published by the USPTO is anything to go by, future iPads might trade in their aluminum shell for ultra-strong carbon fiber.
Over in China, Apple hasn’t had much luck in preventing local gadget knockoff artists from aping the iconic appearance of the iPhone in their own handsets. One of Apple’s few victories in this space, in fact, is their recent success in forcing notorious iPhone clone maker Meizu to shutter production.
All’s not cheery for Apple in China, though. Now another Chinese company called Herron Network Information Co. has come along, and they’re suing Apple as well as the Chinese Patent Bureau over Apple’s iPhone patents, which they attempt to characterize as not just overly broad, but “invalid.”
We have just learned that a new patent has confirmed Cult of Mac’s earlier report that Apple is working on ambitious remote computing tech that would allow files and settings to be transferred between the Mac and iPhone through a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip.
If a new patent spotted by the USPTO archeologists over at Patently Apple is believed, Lion might boasts a new way to navigate menus that would make Mac OS X more suitable to touch input than ever before.
Ever played Lazer Tag? If Apple has its druthers, next time you play it, it won’t be with big ray guns and fluorescent sensors, but with your iPhone.
Apple’s gaming plans are described in a newly discovered patent dated April 2009 for “Interactive Gaming with Co-Located, Networked Direction and Location Aware Devices.”
The nitty gritty’s a lot cooler than that dry legalese description, though: what Apple is describing here is away to take advantage of an iPhone’s gyroscope, accelerometer and GPS to turn your handset into an aimable device that can talk to other iPhones that it is pointed at.
Apple’s patent battle with Nokia might not be going to plan for Cupertino’s lawyers: staff of the International Trade Commission have reportedly told the judge in the case that Apple’s patent allegations are “unfounded.”
The case is being heard for the first time before Judge Charles Bullock today, but as Bloomberg reports, the third-party of the ITC does not feel Apple’s patents have merit.
If the back of your iPod or iPod Touch looks anything like the back of my iPod Touch, it probably looks like it’s spent a few hours in a rock tumbler on a low stuffed with diamonds… but if a new Apple patent application pans out, Cupertino may already have some plans to unleash new scratch-resistant coatings on their gadgets in the near future.
Want to pick yourself up one of Sanho’s amazing HyperMac batteries, which will allow you to recharge your MacBook, iPhone or iPad for dozens or even hundreds of hours on a single charge?
Well, better get moving: Sanho has just sent out a notice saying that they will soon stop selling their line of HyperMac products due to their current legal woes with Apple.
It describes an intelligent control unit or app that filters text messages if they contain “objectionable” content.
Designed to give parents more control over their children’s’ text messages, the system can also be set up to check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If kids grades are dropping at school, parents can block messages unless they are grammatical and free of spelling errors. Likewise, the sytem can check for foreign language words, so if the child is suposed to learning Spanish, it will only send messages that contain a minimum number of Spanish words.
The file cabinets of mobile companies are always filled with patents, but it’s only recently they have started going to war over them. Before 2007, in fact, most patent disputes were handled behind closed doors with smiles and handshakes. Then the iPhone came along, and all of a sudden, it was sue or die.
Motorola’s the latest company to launch into the smartphone patent lawsuit fray, lodging
a series of patent infringement complaints against Apple in both Northern Illinois and Southern Florida federal district courts, as well as asking the International Trade Commission to ban Apple from importing, marketing or selling all iOS devices, as well as some Mac products. They’re out for blood.
Although I never end up using it unless I happen to browse music on my iPhone in a supine position, by most accounts, people love Cover Flow, Apple’s virtual shelf for iTunes on the Mac and iOS that displays albums by their cover art (or, in OS X, by its preview image). A nice flourish, but not particularly functional for dealing with large collections, I’ve always thought. Not really worth it.
You have to wonder if Apple isn’t wondering the same thing this morning, after an East Texas Federal Court passed down a ruling saying that Apple has infringed on patents held by Mirror Worlds, a company started by Yale computer science professor and, tragically, Unabomber victim David Gelernter… and been commanded by the court to pay $208.5 million in damages for the transgression.
This week’s Apple patent news comes out of China, where a couple of new iPad designs have been discovered in line drawing, describing an iPad with dual dock connectors and an iPad with a smart bezel button.
Look at any of Apple’s newest iPods — the new Shuffle, the touchscreen nano, the iPod Touch — and you will find three devices as tiny, svelte or both as Cupertino can possibly make them. In fact, all of these devices are scarcely thicker at this point than the width of their widest single element —the 3.5mm audio jack — which means that if they are ever going to lose any more chunk, that audio jack is going to need to get even smaller.
It turns out that is exactly what Apple is currently working on, according to a recently filed patent. The new audio jacks uses deflectable “pogo pins”, instead of the usual cantilever beams which extend into a jack cavity and are pushed out of the way when your headphone plug is inserted, allowing audio and electricity to be transmitted.
Always faddish in their production of knock-offs and crap gadgets, the black market electronic shops of the Far East have lately been disgorging a surplus of cases that sandwich in a SIM slot and a cellular radio, thus allowing you to make phone calls on your jailbroken iPod Touch. They’re clever hacks, to be sure, but it appears that Cupertino itself has already thought of just that approach to transforming an iPod Touch into an iPhone… and if Apple can think of it, you can bet that they’ve patented it.
In fact, earlier this year, Apple filed a patent application for an “accessory transceiver” that would bring mobile calling and data to the iPod Touch. You know, just like the Peel 520. Or the tPhone. Or any of the other iTouch-to-iPhone cases we’ve written about since August.
The team at Patently Apple mined a patent granted today to find what may be future gold: more evidence that the Cupertino company is toying with the idea of touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks.
After slogging through patent no. 20100100947, titled “Scheme for Authenticating without Password Exchange,” they discovered a flowchart illustrating a touchscreen that could be associated with both a Macbook and a small desktop.
In a patent that even these document hounds defined “obscure,” the flowchart they sniffed out points to a touchscreen component not restricted to the iPhone.
Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics has sued Apple for the unauthorized use of two of Elan’s patents in Apple’s MacBook, iPhone and iPod Touch products.
“We couldn’t find a common viewpoint with Apple, so we decided we had to take action,” Elan spokesman Dennis Liu told the New York Times, adding that the companies had been in licensing talks for about two years.
A statement published on Elan’s website says the patents cover innovations in touch-sensitive input devices incorporated into smartphones and computer touchpads.
“The first patent at issue, U.S. Patent 5,825,352 (“the ‘352 patent”), relates to touch-sensitive input devices with the ability to detect the simultaneous presence of two or more fingers. Multi-finger applications are becoming popular in smartphone and computer applications. The ‘352 patent is a fundamental patent to the detection of multi-fingers that allows for any subsequent multi-finger applications to be implemented. The second patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,274,353 (“the ‘353 patent”), is directed to touchpads capable of switching between keyboard and handwriting input modes.”
Elan said it won a preliminary court injunction against a U.S.-based rival, Synaptics, in a dispute over one of the patents mentioned in the Apple lawsuit, after a suit was filed in 2006 by a unit that was a subsidiary at the time. Synaptics countersued.
Both actions were dismissed last year after the two companies reached a cross-licensing agreement. That result likely emboldened the company to take legal action against Apple, an analyst who follows Elan told the NYT.
A feature called “Now Playing,” launched in fall 2007, allowed latte-sippers to wander into a Starbucks, log onto the iTunes Store with a laptop, iPod Touch or iPhone and instantly see what song was playing in-store, plus browse and buy music on iTunes.
Unwired View found a patent Apple filed for a similar feature.
The basic idea: place a local cache of iTunes media store server at a retail location and follow the music played from that cache. The associated info is beamed to iPhones and Macbooks via local Wi-Fi network.
Apple envisions lots of in-store tie-ins and cross selling thanks to the feature.
From the patent application:
“One advantage of the invention is that patrons of establishments can dynamically receive store-based information while at the establishments. Store-based information facilitates user experience and can also facilitate locating associated media content from an online media store.
In store-based information can be displayed on a patron’s portable electronic device while the patron in the store… The online media store can coordinate with central management to make store-based information centrally stored and accessible…”
