“Apple can’t stop dreaming up with ways to keep its glass screens from cracking,” Adam Clark Estes reports for Gizmodo. “The latest attempt comes in the form of a pretty bombastic patent which was just approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Basically, it would make your iPhone fall like a cat.”
“Using input from a combination of gyroscopes, accelerometers, and GPS, a device equipped with this new ‘protective mechanism’ will recognize when it’s in free fall and calculate metrics like speed of descent and time to impact,” Estes reports. “The device would then use an onboard motor to reorient itself in order to protect fragile components like the screen or the camera when it hits the ground.”
Estes reports, “The device’s on-board vibration motor could be employed, so it would even screech a little bit as it feel towards Earth, just like a cat.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, we can think up a whole list of cat codenames for future iOS versions!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “FPC” and “Brian Allen” for the heads up.]
How ingenious, if true.
Pretty ingenious even if not true.
They should put little cat feet on it.
Yes, this should be a case. That Apple Cat Case with 9 warranties!
It rights itself, then fires a grappling hook into your pants, then swings safely to ground.
Sounds good – but its aim had better be fantastic.
Apple has never seen my cat fall.
Better yet, they could add a Buttered Bread app so the phone would hover just off the floor.
Scrolls like butter!
Can’t it just deploy a parachute?
I think Iron Man armor sliding into place and enclosing the whole phone would be more feasible.
It would also aid in waterproofing when falling into restroom toilets. Or hotel jacuzzis.
Just put some anti-gravity field generators in there so the phones can’t drop at all.
Bombastic seems like the wrong adjective to describe such a method to right a phone during free fall. If the solution was so obvious why didn’t someone else patent it? I stopped reading Giz years ago because of the horrendous grammar and spelling errors.
How about it just deploy a parachute or an airbag while in free-fall?
What would happen if you tied the iPhone to the back of a cat and then dropped it?
I hate cats. It’s not their fault, but I just hate them. Actually, I think I hate cat people.
Don’t hate them because they disdain you, realise they were bred by pharoahs and immortalised. Despite their aloofness, they keep rats and snakes away from your domicile, whilst dogs only keep away the postman and the narcs.
Cat-like? Great – an iPhone that ignores you when you call it.