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Apple Patent Paves Way For iPhone With Full-Face Display, HUD Windows (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Apple Insider: Apple on Tuesday was granted a patent detailing technology that allows for ear speakers, cameras and even a heads-up display to hide behind an edge-to-edge screen, a design rumored to debut in a next-generation iPhone later this year. Awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple's U.S. Patent No. 9,543,364 for "Electronic devices having displays with openings" describes a method by which various components can be mounted behind perforations in a device screen that are so small as to be imperceptible to the human eye. This arrangement would allow engineers to design a smartphone or tablet with a true edge-to-edge, or "full face," display. With smartphones becoming increasingly more compact, there has been a push to move essential components behind the active -- or light-emitting -- area of incorporated displays. Apple in its patent suggests mounting sensors and other equipment behind a series of openings, or through-holes, in the active portion of an OLED or similar panel. These openings might be left empty or, if desired, filled with glass, polymers, radio-transparent ceramic or other suitable material. Positioning sensor inputs directly in line with said openings facilitates the gathering of light, radio waves and acoustic signals. Microphones, cameras, antennas, light sensors and other equipment would therefore have unimpeded access beyond the display layer. The design also accommodates larger structures like iPhone's home button. According to the document, openings are formed between pixels, suggesting a self-illuminating display technology like OLED is preferred over traditional LCD structures that require backlight and filter layers. Hole groupings can be arranged in various shapes depending on the application, and might be larger or smaller than the underlying component. If implemented into a future iPhone, the window-based HUD could be Apple's first foray into augmented reality. Apple leaves the mechanics unmentioned, but the system could theoretically go beyond AR and into mixed reality applications.
No. They patented the iHole!
Vague, broad patents fall to prior art.
Specific patents fall to altered details.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I believe a pinhole camera behind the screen has also been done. Don't recall by who.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's going to make it a lot harder to cover your camera. The spooks will love it.
This kind of patent should require a working prototype at least. If apple can build it then might be worth considering a patent. If it is beyond their technology then it is really blocking other people who could develop it first.
I also need to get my patent in for FTL drive, teleporter and replicator etc.
No, but if it has been done repeatedly with multiple other kinds of screens, there's a good chance that it fails the non-obvious test, unless the means for making those holes is something particularly complex.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You do understand the Motorola Star-TAC was DIRECTLY influenced by Star Trek right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I know lots of people working on voice recognition that reference the 'Hello Computer' scene from Star Trek IV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Good-bye
Apple patented magnetic connectors which Japanese appliance manufacturers had been doing for years. The Japanese had been putting magnetic connectors on Rice Cookers, Toasters, and Irons for a few years, then Apple patented the idea of putting using it on a laptop.
In the early 90s, IBM had patented finger scrolling web pages on touchscreen monitors. Apple filed for a patent on finger scrolling on a touchscreen only smartphone display and got it.
My suggestion is that someone patent the idea of putting magnetic connectors on a laptop that contains an ultra high resolution screen or more than 2 TB of SSD.
I can prove that in 2005 (two years before the iPhone launched) I stated on slashdot that touchscreen phones with large displays would sell. Needless to say everyone thought it was a dumb idea, except maybe Steve Jobs. âhttp://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=163341&cid=13644457â
I am still waiting for my check from Apple and Samsung.
Nonsense. It has two benefits. You also have a greater chance of dropping the phone while trying to hold it in a way that doesn't cover up part of the screen. It's pretty obvious why zero-bezel cell phones are good for manufacturers. I have yet to see any reason why they are good for users.
Now a zero-bezel laptop screen... that would be useful....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
iHole would be the naming convention under Steve Jobs. Under Timmy, the proper name is the A-Hole. It's a good match for the A-Watch and A-TV.
I covered that possibility when I said, "unless the means for making those holes is something particularly complex." If they have a unique way of growing a crystalline lattice with a hole in it, that's novel. But unless the mechanism for creating the hole is novel, the entire patent is likely obvious. After all, routing traces around a hole is basic circuit design, fudging the brightness of adjacent subpixels to hide dead ones is a trivial extension of how digital cameras deal with dead sensor pixels, etc. (I'm assuming that they are doing those things; I haven't read the patent.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The patent describes the HUD as being a transparent display over a hole/window in the device. I can't see that being very likely in the near future. Either the hole is too small to see much through, or the window takes up a big portion of the phone. You can't hold a small window up to the eye and still focus on the display, unless it uses some sort of lightfield display. AR isn't as simple as a see-through display.
> The Japanese had been putting magnetic connectors on Rice Cookers, Toasters,
> and Irons for a few years, then Apple patented the idea of putting using it on a laptop.
So basically, Apple patented "doing it on a computer".
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Apple Patent Paves Way For iPhone With Full-Face Display, HUD Windows
Not "Windows," but "windows," of course.
Title case is a pointless, arbitrary, and confusing tradition. Let it die.
No-one Writes Anything Else Like This, So Why News Headlines?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Or worse, unintentionally clicking something in the on-screen minefield of 'like', '+1', and 'buy now with one click & no subsequent confirmation' that now plagues daily use.
.. So I don't have to look down at my instrument cluster when trying to navigate traffic. Fuck you, skully.
- It specifically mentions that it must be an OLED screen.
So they don't own OLED screens. They don't own micro-holes. But they get to patent putting micro-holes in an OLED screen. I see...
They're not really patenting how to make such a screen - they're patenting the idea of having a screen with micro-holes providing access to controls underneath - and then getting a monopoly on the only way to implement such a thing using today's off-the-shelf components, none of which they invented or own. Sounds like a classic 'do A on a B' patent. Rejected (In our dreams).
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
One. 3.5mm. For a headphone. And I'll go away satisfied.
Have gnu, will travel.
Y'know what the problem really is with this. They're coming up with an arguably new screen technology, getting a patent monopoly on it, and then applying that monopoly to the whole device, so that only Apple can build 'micro-hole OLED' smartphones.
I could see them being granted a patent on the screen manufacturing process - and collecting royalties from anyone who wants to build such a screen. Or even insisting on being the sole source for such screens. But when they then limit the universe of available devices using those screens to themselves, the patent system has started going overboard.
Imagine if Apple had invented fingerprint scanning - or if Samsung had. Then no other device could use a fingerprint scanner - because Apple or Samsung wants to maintain a monopoly on smartphones with that useful feature, not just the fingerprint scanner monopoly the patent office granted them. Whoever invented the fingerprint scanner has come up with a true invention, which they arguably have the right to collect payments on. But when you start letting them dictate who they'll sell that invention to and how that invention may be used, you're limiting innovation instead of encouraging it.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Now that's innovation
Apple has sharp teams of lawyers, which has always been one of their strongest points. They've sued their way to success going back to the days when they ran Apple II cloners out of business and sued anybody who came out with a GUI environment. They continued to run GUI vendors out of business, until they ran up against Windows, and thus effectively gave the GUI dominance to Microsoft.
Thanks, Apple.
"technology that allows for ear speakers"
As opposed to what, nose speakers? Toe speakers? Speakers in suppository form?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You do understand the Motorola Star-TAC was DIRECTLY influenced by Star Trek right?
I know lots of people working on voice recognition that reference the 'Hello Computer' scene from Star Trek IV.
Okay, I don't know about that, but Picard was a Jedi, right?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Ear Phones! Brilliant!
At best, I'll cover some small bits of the display at the edge. More likely, I'll be accidentally doing a multi-touch long-press.
It's hardly just Apple. The way "we" (more accurate word: "they") have built the imaginary property system insanely incentivizes the idea of blasting territory-claim flags as fast as you can shotgun them.
It's basically the grown-up version of calling dibs. And it's pay-to-play.
This logic invalidates basically anything that comes after 1940. Using your awesome reasoning, nothing about LTE should be patentable, because voice and data transmitted over radio waves has been done since the 1920s.
Details matter.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Apple was so far ahead on the GUI in the late 80s that if they had just produced "Macintosh" as an operating environment for all the x86 hardware and UNIX workstations on the market, they would be running the Windows operation now and would have owned that for decades. Instead they wanted to sell their proprietary hardware with their GUI bundled on top. And as said above, they sued all of Microsoft's competitors on the 'x86 platform out of the way for them. While at the same time, Microsoft was making a mint selling Word and Excel for the Mac.
Apple has a long tradition of 'thinking small.' Though they changed that in their new gadget era. Jobs chided Skully about spending his life 'selling sugar water to kids' and ended up selling shiney gadgets himself.
If memory serves, Apple didn't patent magsafe. The licensed it, exclusively, in the the laptop market. The basic tech isn't new at all and the patent has since expired - clearly since there's at least a dozen kickstart/indegogo/etc. crowd funded magnetic connectors for phones and laptops floating around at the moment.
There may have been something unique about the magsafe method as well which separated it from the appliance usage of similar tech.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Guess I should have googled. Correcting myself and answering your 'question'.
The basic concept of MagSafe is copied from the magnetic power connectors that are part of many deep fryers and Japanese countertop cooking appliances since the early 2000s in order to avoid spilling their dangerously hot contents.[2][3][4] Apple was granted US Patent No. 7311526 on MagSafe ("Magnetic connector for electronic device", issued in 2007) as MagSafe was deemed to be a sufficient improvement due to the connector being symmetrical and reversible, and the fact that magnets within a connector are arranged in opposing polarities for improved coupling strength.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.