“Wearable devices like the Apple Watch and Internet of Things hardware could have an easier time connecting to iPhones and other devices in the future, with Apple coming up with multiple ways to deal with inter-device connectivity, including the ability to make a wide-area network where Internet access isn’t available,” Malcolm Owen reports for AppleInsider.
“The increase in the number of devices in the world is producing new challenges relating to connectivity,” Owen reports. “As part of a solution to this, Apple has filed three patent applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office suggesting slightly different ways to establish and operate a connection between pieces of hardware.”
“One extreme example could be a natural disaster that knocks out or overloads cellular networks in an area,” Owen reports. “By being able to establish connections between mobile phones without relying on the cellular network, this could allow there to be a mesh-style network running between all of the devices, allowing some level of communications through.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As anyone who’s unfortunately been involved in an emergency and/or disaster knows very well, those are precisely the times when connectivity is most needed, yet also the most elusive. Hopefully, Apple’s work on these inventions can help in such situations.
If Timmy hadn’t abandoned Airport development years ago, Apple could have the best most secure mesh networking on the market. Too bad. Today it is doubtful Apple has the engineering chops to offer such a thing.
This also opens the possibility to circumvent the cell phone towers altogether for regular phone service, provided there is a sufficient density of Apple products on the path between two connecting iPhones. Shh!!! Don’t tell anybody!!!!
Dream on. As it is now Ive’s thin design ethos doesn’t allow iPhones to fully use the features that are advertised today without charging at least once or twice.
To enable constant meshing…..Every iphone would need a humpback battery case.
To avoid a constant on which could very well require a “humpback,” an Apple gadget could ping periodically to home in on another authorized pinging device. The pings would have to be timed to synchronize with all other pinging devices. By that method, the capability of your larger battery could be as small as, well, normal size.