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Jeff Bezos Wants To Put an Airbag In Your iPhone
theodp writes "Don't want to pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped? Neither, apparently, does Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. A patent application made public Thursday lists Bezos as an inventor of 'a system and method for protecting devices from impact damage,' which proposes using airbags, springs, and even a jet propulsion system to keep your iPhones, iPads, and other portable devices safe and out of the clutches of the Genius Bar. Let's hope there's an API — those gas cartridges could be a game-changer for fart apps!"
And, in the unlikely event that it just deploys spontaneously I don't want an airbag up against my ear.
Wait, you still use a phone to make calls? How quaint...
The force of deceleration is a function of how fast you are going and over how short a distance you stop. People's desire to not have huge, bulbous cases sharply limits the amount of nice, gentle, elastic deceleration the case gets to provide before the 'concrete period' of the descent begins...
At the cost of additional complexity, airbags would theoretically give you all the advantages of having a case so comically thick that you would never use it, in a case that you would actually use.
TFA, and TF Linked Patent Application, don't contain the words "Apple," "iPhone" or "iPad" at all. The headline of TFA says, "Smartphone."
Did Slashdot substitute that with "iPhone" just to get the nerds all riled up? Wouldn't be the first time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6PsnCs07aw
And this gas cartridge is also an awesome excuse for the TSA to keep phones off of airplanes entirely! I see the plan here...
If the phone senses it is falling, it will automatically dial your mother in law. Airbag deployed - phone saved. You're welcome. ;)
Rollercoaster.
The phone can at most, when dropped (as opposed to "be thrown"), accelerate at 1G, no? You can exceed that in a car. Or taking off in a plane. Rollercoasters can get upward of 4. Nothing like this thing exploding in your pocket when the light turns green.
And the directional stuff I've seen on most are pretty laggy. Is there really time for it to wake up, determine which way is down, that it's heading there, that it's not a whale or bowl of petunias, and deploy an airbag?
Another word: GLOVES.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
"pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped?" is utterly wrong. A new iPhone with no new contract attached to it costs much more than $199 -- $649 to be precise.
Paying $199 to have it replaced if totally destroyed is not that bad actually.
There are certainly designs and materials that are better and worse in terms of how well they make this tradeoff; but one problem with impact resistance(abundantly seen in recent trends in phone design) is that a number of the things that make a phone good at resisting impact ironically make it feel like cheap shit in use.
Your basic free-on-contract snap-on-ABS-modular-carrier-branding-panels-and-not-especially-tight-tolerances dumbphone is actually pretty good at being resistant to drops. The ABS flexes, absorbing some of the energy, the battery door pops off and goes flying, and the LCD is a dinky little module loosely held behind a plastic cover by a ribbon cable and a couple of pegs. You can practically feel the thing flex when you try to use it; but it simply flexes and springs back when dropped.
Your canonical contemporary smartphone, by contrast, is designed to feel like a solid 2001-but-with-a-touchscreen slab of the future. No flex, no wasted volume that acts as a 'crumple zone', toughened glass that is much more scuff resistant than plastic; but shatters rather than denting/scratching, etc. Feels impenetrable in use; but inelastic collisions are painful...
But I do want that going off in a phone thief's trousers!
Can we get the "iED" option added to Find My iPhone?
(FYI: airbag cartridges are an "are you fscking kidding me" item for carry-on or checked baggage.)
CAPTCHA: blister. Yeah, I bet it would.
I hope not. I'd fail them all for this idea.
Getting the economics to work out is largely a matter of tweaking the sensitivity of the trigger and designing the consumable properly.
That's the problem with patents nowadays. even if you don't make the stuff (or produce any stuff except bullshit patents), you can collect a tax on people who work out the actual tricky practical details.
The innovative part is actually creating something that fits in/on/around a phone that can tell the difference between it falling to the floor and it falling in your pocket towards the floor or you running with it in your hand/handbag and swinging it around, or you dropping the phone into a bag or onto a bed. Or does it such a way where false positives don't cause big/expensive problems.
The patent is probably so wide and generic that even if some genius figures out the details later (maybe a redeployable airbag that inflates not too quickly and can be re-deflated manually so as to not be an expensive "per pop" device that destroys stuff), they'd have to pay Bezos money even though Bezos might have zero idea of how to actually make something that solves all the problems I mentioned (not saying he has zero idea, just saying he doesn't have to have any idea about the details).
And that's why the patent system is broken and doesn't really encourage innovation.
I can write all the sci-fi bullshit I want, it doesn't mean that it will make the stuff appear, and if I can actually collect a tax on people who actually build stuff, does it really encourage innovation?
Some ruggedized systems do pretty much that. Lots of silicone or other rubber padding(there are also some neat non-newtonian gel materials in limited use, whose properties conveniently change according to the strength and speed of impact), flex space for vulnerable components like HDDs, and use of suitably flexible polycarbonate or other aesthetically-questionable-but-not-brittle case materials.
All that adds bulk, though. As best I can tell(in the same way that everybody loaths wall-wart AC adapters; but manufacturers use them because they are cheap and make the product itself look a lot slimmer), electronics design, outside of explicitly ruggedized products or low-end low-tolerance plasticy stuff, has headed in the direction of making slim, beautiful, and vulnerable hardware, and letting the customer feel the shiny first, and then go out and add the ugly-but practical silicone case after the initial purchase...