Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Patents Whacking Your Phone To Silence It
another random user writes with news of a patent application from Microsoft that details a method for silencing your phone by giving it a whack. "There are a variety of circumstances under which it may be desirable to quickly control a device without having to interact with a traditional user interface. For example, often mobile device users forget to set their mobile devices in a silent or vibrate mode and the device rings or makes sounds at an inopportune moment." And yes, 'whack' is the technical term used in the patent (20120231838): "receiving information indicative of acceleration of the mobile communications device; determining correlation between the information indicative of acceleration of the mobile communications device and exemplar whack event data; and based at least on the correlation, controlling an audio signal of the mobile communications device." This method is not recommended for controlling the audio output of animals or children.
If it's so obvious, why has nobody yet done it with more than 5 years of smartphones on the market.
Actually, my Nexus S (which is already a two year old model I think) has been doing this ever since I can remember.
In fact, that's probably why Microsoft used the word "whack", and not "shake" or "move". If they had used any of those other words, a simple bing search (yes, even a bing search I tell you) would have uncovered multiple instances of prior art on both Android and on the iPhone.
No doubt, they'll try to use this little play on words in their commercials to say how unique the feature is, and how they're the only one who have it because they patented the idea.