“We will give Apple engineers the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren’t inspired to create new drop-protection technology for iPhones by throwing cats out of a fourth-story window,” Ethan Baron reports for SiliconBeat.
“Yet the method they’ve proposed in a new patent application for keeping dropped phones from breaking bears a remarkable resemblance to the behavior of a plunging cat, which can orient itself mid-air for the safest landing, on its feet,” Baron reports. “Just as Whiskers stays safest in a fall by landing on her paws, the iPhone can protect itself by landing on its edge.”
“To accomplish that, Apple inventors Fletcher Rothkopf, Colin Ely and Stephen Lynch propose techniques including a sliding or spinning mass inside the phone to change the orientation of the device as it falls,” Baron reports. “They also suggest that a tiny canister inside the phone could blast out gas through external nozzles to change orientation, like thrusters on a spaceship, or even to provide a lunar-lander experience for the phone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “A tiny canister inside the phone could blast out gas through external nozzles?” Yeesh.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Is this is a late posting from April 1st??
I can see the headlines now… “Farting iPhone”.
Find another solution please.
The future of virtual reality – Smell-O-Vision!
This was a patent apple won earlier in the month. Nothing “new” here. see report: http://bit.ly/1P8y18x
No wonder they won it LOL
No wonder they won it LOL!
With the unintended pocket consequence of blowing off male appendages. “Oops, sorry.”
Gotta think of unusual ways to solve problems to eventually find one that does work. Might be 45 bad ideas but the 46th might be the one.
Not if you throw them right.
hey where did my post go. I proposed mini air bags that deploy. I’ll just get a percentage of the patent and apple can have the whole idea and implement it.
Oh great, more moving parts.. 😛
A yo-yo shaped iPhone with a string properly attached to the hand would make every iPhone drop appear intentional, and the immediate retrieval quite clever.
Those Apple engineers might be overthinking the concept. Simply strap your iPhone to the back of your cat and you should be all set.
Just put peanut butter on the back side. That will be the side that always hits the ground.
Tiny canisters……….man are we going to have to visit the apple store to top up.
Knowing my luck, if I dropped one of these super-shockproof iPhones, the rocket thrusters would over-compensate for the drop and it would shoot upwards. The parachute would then deploy and the wind would blow it into a fast flowing river, never to be seen again.
I think I’d rather take my chances with an iPhone that should be able to survive a drop onto a hard floor and if the screen ever breaks, I’d at least be able to pick it up and get the screen replaced.
The full patent with IMAGES is posted here:
http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20160154439&IDKey=356746600E4E&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fappft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526d%3DPG01%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html%2526r%3D1%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526s1%3D20160154439.PGNR.%2526OS%3D%2526RS%3D
URL from hell much?
I’m not sure what to make of this patent.
I think they need something that determines the mass of the iPhone being dropped along with any casing it may be in plus any accessories that may make the falling iPhone non-symmetrical to determine the amount of angular momentum to correctly ‘right’ the phone for impact.
Test
You get ~$2k for having a patent granted at Apple. So people file all kinds of ridiculous ideas.