Hasta La Gadget!

Apple could turn the television industry topsy-turvy with a new Apple TV. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Much has been said about the amazing contributions Steve Jobs has made to the technology world as Apple’s leader. But what can we expect from Apple now that Jobs has stepped down as CEO?

New CEO Tim Cook has assured employees that “Apple is not going to change,” and a peek at what we’ll see from Cupertino suggests Apple plans to remain on the vanguard.

A look at some patents Apple has sought and received offers a lay of the land.

Game-Changing Apple TV

Longtime Apple watcher Walt Mossberg says “rumors are rife that Apple is working on re-inventing another common device: the TV. The secretive company won’t say a word about that, but nobody should be surprised if it happens, just based on Jobs’ track record.”

Rather than just churning out a set-top box like Apple TV, Cupertino may be working on a smart TV with iOS integration. Some say it will be a 55-inch OLED TV.

A patent for “An Enhanced TV Widget Paradigm” suggests Apple will ditch conventional static widgets (present on current smart TVs and smart-TV upgraders), in favor of content-aware widgets that provide information or activities that complement what you’re watching.

Devices With a Hybrid LCD, E-Ink Display

Another patent filing suggests Apple will deliver an iPhone and iPad with a hybrid LCD, e-ink display. The “electronic paper” display would allow for easier reading in bright sunlight, or in situation where a backlit LCD is too harsh.

The patent describes a screen with “multiple composite display regions” featuring individually activated backlights that could be turned on or off to display some content (like text on a web page) in the appropriate scenario. Such a display would require significantly less power than conventional displays, improving battery life.

One way this could be implemented would be to sandwich a transparent e-ink display between a capacitive touchscreen and either an LCD or OLED.

Integrated Projector in Mobile Devices

Future Apple mobile devices will include an integrated projector.

The patent describes how the projector would display information on a flat surface like a wall. Multiple devices could be combined to display a single image in a “unified display mode.”

The projector would be able to interpret gestures and silhouette movements. For example, an image could be swiped from the projected display of one device, to that of another.

Voice Identification

No more swiping your finger or entering a passcode to unlock your iGadget. The next wave of iOS devices could use voice identification to switch out of its lockscreen.

This already exists in numerous devices, but in a different way: These systems use large word libraries that can complicate voice-input analysis. Apple’s solution would identify users by the sound of their voice. That person could use voice inputs to navigate their device without worrying about the chatterbox across the room or raising their voice to bark out commands.

By tracking the voice of each user, the system could be dynamically tailored to their interests and unique needs. Multiple users could share the device, but specific content or contacts would remain unique to each individual user.

OSX and iOS Full Convergence

By the end of 2012, we may see iOS and OSX converge into a unified operating system.

“Users want to be able to pick up any iPhone, iPad or Mac (or turn on their iTV) and have content move seamlessly between them and be optimized for the user and the device currently being used,” said Peter Misek, an analyst with Jefferies.

Devices running iOS and OSX currently use different processors. Once all Apple computing devices — iPhones, iPads and MacBooks or MacBook Airs — run the same processor, likely ARM, it will be easier for them to support the same operating system. Users could easily share information and files between devices (especially when used in conjunction with iCloud).

We’ve already seen how OSX Lion has adopted features from iOS, like natural scrolling and LaunchPad, which resembles the iPad’s home screen.

Workplace Integration

With these innovations and others, we also expect Apple to take the business enterprise industry by storm. This isn’t quite an innovation in itself on Apple’s part, but a result of their products, their applications and the platform.

“Apple is the first and only vendor that really supports the enterprise platform,” says Brian Fino, founder and managing director of Fino Consulting, which provides enterprise solutions for Fortune 1000 companies. “We’ve seen a dramatic and significant shift toward Apple products, the iPad in particular. And with iOS 5’s over-the-air upgrades, users will have untethered management of devices.”

Many consumers like bringing in their iPad (or other Apple devices) to and from work, and have requested enterprise solutions from Fino’s company. Airplay currently allows for wireless streaming from the iPad to an HDTV via Apple TV. As Apple continues to support and expand this capability, businesses will find these products increasingly useful and convenient.

Just what were you doing at 13 years old?

[UPDATE Aug 22 2011. All may not be as it seems. According to Gadget Lab reader and grown-up Patrick Theiner, Dwyer made several schoolboy errors when making his experiments. An article debunking the experiment and results appears on the UVdiv blog. Apparently Dwyer was measuring the open voltage on the circuit, which “is practically independent of power output,” and stays all but constant regardless of light falling on the cells.

This post also says that the theory is flawed, and that pointing the panels in different directions, most of which aren’t at the optimal angle to the incoming light, will yield less power than a flat panel. You can read the full math here. (Oddly, the post has itself disappeared, but you can read Google’s cache.]

13-year-old Aiden Dwyer has managed to do something that grown-up scientists haven’t. He has wrung up to 50% extra electricity from regular solar cells. How? Brains, trees, and a dash of math geekery.

Dwyer was hiking in the Catskill mountains when he started to see patterns in the mess of branches. Where you or I might see chaos, Dwyer saw spirals. Measuring the patterns, he found that the spiral forms of the leaves and branches were placed according to fractions that obey the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…).

Trees and plants are pretty good at capturing sunlight, right? So Dwyer took these numbers and built his own tree, only instead of leaves the tree has solar cells:

I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing.

In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible.

As a control, he also built a regular flat-panel solar array, familiar to eco-hippies everywhere (but mostly Californian eco-hippies).

Dwyer tested the two arrays side-by-side from October to December. Under the more plentiful October sun, his tree “made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day.” But in December, when light is scarce, “the tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer.”

Not bad, right? And Dwyer isn’t done yet. Currently he’s investigating the different Fibonacci patterns on different trees to find out which is most efficient. As it is, his invention tracks the Sun better, produces more power and takes up less space than a traditional flat cell array. Suck on that, adult scientists!

The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees [American Museum of Natural History via the Giz]

This bionic leg lets amputees walk naturally

Vanderbilt University’s new bionic leg lets amputees walk without limping along like Kaiser Söze. Unlike the average peg-leg, the Vanderbilt leg has motors in the knee and ankle to actively move like the real thing. Sensors and microprocessors predict what the user is about to do and the leg moves accordingly.

An amputee can walk around 25 percent faster on the Vanderbilt leg, mostly because it takes a lot less of his energy to do it. The leg itself is also pretty light on power, running for up to three days (or 14 kilometers) on a single charge. The motors are still noisy, though — despite being a lot quieter than previous incarnations, the current version “is sightly louder than [the researchers] would like.” It’s not all bad: with the whiny motor sounds you’ll sound just like Robocop when you walk.

New ‘bionic’ leg gives amputees a natural gait [Vanderbilt University via Physorg and the Giz]

See Also:

• Bionic Eye Attempts to Restore Vision
• Bionic Cat Walks on Prosthetic Legs
• Gallery: Bionic Arms Gain Power, Dexterity, Sensitivity
• New Bionic Arms Are Strong, Sensitive, Human-Friendly
• Bionic Fingers Give Amputees New Dexterity

Maxwell von Stein’s bike has a great big flywheel in the middle of its frame. It stores energy when the bike slows down and then feeds it back to the wheels when you need a boost. It’s like the regenerative braking used in a hybrid car, only the motion is stored as motion instead of being converted to electricity, stored in a battery and then converted back to movement again.

The 15-pound wheel sits in the middle of the frame and is engaged by the rider. It is “charged” by the movement of the bike, slowing it down without brakes. Then, when you hit a hill, or are just feeling tired or lazy, you can fed the power back into the wheel.

As concepts go, it’s an interesting one, but lugging a wheel that almost doubles the weight of the bike might make it somewhat impractical in actual use. According to an NPR spot featuring the invention, von Stein has ideas to put flywheels in cars, where they may be more practical.

Flywheels in cars? That actually sounds pretty awesome. Maybe you could pull them back and then let them go, just like those little flywheel-powered toy cars.

Video Pick: Flywheel Bicycle [NPR via Oh Gizmo!]

See Also:

• Video: Bike Powered Welding Machine
• Cycleops: Indoor Training on Your Own Bike
• GyroBike Teaches Kids How To Kill a Spill
• Plantronics Tries to Patent Nod Powered Headset

Remember your first cellphone? If you’re old enough, that memory will include a pull-out antenna of some kind, a vestigial RF tail whose genes were passed down from walkie-talkies and field radios of old. And it seems that Apple, presumably before building its multi-zillion-dollar antenna lab, was also experimenting with pop-up antennae on its old MacBook Pros.

Here’s a photo of a heretofore secret prototype MacBook Pro with built-in 3G, up for sale on Ebay and currently requiring a bid of over $11,000 to win the auction. Externally, the Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro looks like any other pre-unibody MBP, apart from a small slide-out rabbit ear in the top right corner of the lid. This extends to give better reception to the soldered-on SIM circuit board within. The inside is also full of prototype gear, from the red motherboard to the “evaluation” optical drive (going on the optical drives in the current MacBook Airs, I guess it failed the evaluation [**rimshot**]).

Interesting is the amount of polish that has gone into hardware which was destined never to see the comfort of an Apple Store display table. Not only is that antenna a perfect match for the lid, but the SIM card slot has a very professional-looking home in the battery bay (just like a cellphone).

If (and probably when) the MacBook Air gets a 3G radio, the antenna is much more likely to be sitting behind a plastic RF window like that in the iPad 3G, and the SIM will probably have a little pop-out drawer, also like the iPad 3G (and iPhone). Which probably only makes this glimpse inside Apple’s secret design lab all the more interesting.

Unreleased PROTOTYPE Apple Macbook Pro 15″ With 3G [Ebay via TUAW]

See Also:

• Antenna-gate
• Apple's Answer to Antennagate: Free iPhone 4 Cases
• IPhone 4 Loses Reception When Antenna Band Is Touched
• Antenna-Aid Makes iPhone Reception All Better