Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not often that events of a patent tiff transcend the humdrum noise we’re all too used to, but the most recent judgement of a Munich court has declared an Apple patent invalid based on prior art from, well, Apple. As Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents explains, Cupertino has racked up a couple of decisions going against both Samsung and Motorola based on a patent for “portable electronic device[s] for photo management,” which describes a bounce-back aka rubber-banding effect specifically within the iOS photo gallery app. Now, Apple’s lawmen successfully argued the UI feature was different from previous concepts presented by AOL and Microsoft (which could benefit Cook & Co greatly in other cases, Mueller says). However, there was one piece of prior art they couldn’t dispute: the feature in question being shown off by Steve Jobs at the OG iPhone keynote back in January 2007. (We’ve embedded video of the keynote below, but you’ll need to jump to 32:40 to catch the gallery bounce-back bit.)

You see, even though the rubber-banding feature was demonstrated by Apple, on an Apple device, it still counts as prior art that invalidates its own patent — in Europe at least. That’s because documents describing the feature weren’t filed until June 2007, almost six months after Jobs took to the stage. A similar, first-to-file situation is now part of the US system, of course, ever since the America Invents Act was signed into law in 2011. As the first-generation iPhone keynote came years before that, however, it’s unlikely to hold any weight in future US court decisions. Well, you can’t win ’em all Apple, especially when you’re up against yourself.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Apple, Samsung, Google

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Source: FOSS Patents

When it comes to patents, it seems there is always one big tech company suing another, claiming violation and damages over the use of technology that is in some way infringing. One such recent lawsuit came from Nokia over rival HTC, which filed a patent suit against the company claiming some of its smartphones and […]

Now that Microsoft has the reigns to Nokia’s devices and services business, what’s the company going to do with all that spare time on its hands? It’s keeping busy, it seems. Outlined in a separate announcement from Espoo, Nokia is going to play to its existing strengths, continuing to develop its Here maps platform, with the aim of becoming the “leading independent location cloud platform company, offering mapping and location services across different screens and operating systems.”

In the slightly more straight-laced (but profitable) world of network infrastructure, Nokia’s NSN will continue to develop and build LTE networks and, well, whatever comes after that. Which ties in neatly to Nokia’s third focus: advanced technologies. The company aims to continue exploring “new business opportunities,” continuing to research and develop concepts involved in connectivity, sensing and material technologies — possibly along the lines of concepts devices we’ve seen from Nokia in the past. This is also the same arm of the company that’ll keep an eye on Nokia’s patent portfolio. The company is unsurprisingly bullish about its future, with its new interim President, Timo Ihamuotila, reckoning the deal will make Nokia’s financial situation “significantly stronger.”

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry

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Source: Nokia

Ideally, your smart device of the future anticipates your needs and adjusts itself to suit them without requiring input on your behalf. Two newly published patent applications (spotted by AppleInsider) from Apple describe systems that could help do just that for future iPhones and iPads, via selective screen brightness control and auto camera switching during FaceTime video calls.

The first patent application describes a way for a user to selectively adjust brightness and contrast of different user interface elements independently of one another. Essentially, this could work in practice by doing things like selective lightboxing as you might see on a photo-focused website, foregrounding elements that contain active content and providing enhanced visibility as well as offering some battery savings.

This is something that some apps already offer, giving users control over what elements are darkened or made brighter within their specific software. Apple’s invention would have the advantage of making this a system-level feature, and one that works automatically in some cases, lightening the load on developer resources and making it so that users can reasonably predict how any given app will use it. This could have big impacts not only in general usability, but for specific accessibility advantage as well.

The other patent application new today describes a way in which Apple devices might be able to switch automatically between front and rear-facing cameras on the fly, based on cues from the user and what’s being captured by each camera lens. This would require devices to capture both streams at one time, but Apple says in the patent that advances in mobile processor tech have recently begun to make that possible without too much excess demand on system resources.

In practice, such a system would be able to work with live calls via services like FaceTime, so that when a participant says something like “Look what Bruno’s doing” and the rear-facing camera detects a dog-like shape in frame, it switches automatically to broadcasting that feed to the receiving party. This could also work for locally-recorded video, the patent application says, doing things like switching between front and back cameras depending on if it detects the person doing the filming is talking or not.

Both of these are the type of next-gen tech projects that likely won’t make it into hardware for the immediately incoming generation, but they’re logical enough additions to existing features that we could well see them in a couple of years’ time.

Though they’ve not said so in so many words, the folks at Hon Hai Precision (aka Foxconn) have just sold patents to Google that’ll allow the US-based company to expand their hold on the world of augmented reality through head-mounted displays. This buy can quite readily be traced to the wearable device known as Google […]