Author: Team TD

The ongoing legal battles between Samsung and Apple are nothing new. They’ve been going on for what seems like an eternity. The gist of it is that Apple claims Samsung copied their iOS user interface as well as design aspects of the highly popular iPad. Apple is going to all means to ensure they can protect what is allegedly rightly theirs. It hasn’t been smooth sailing for Apple though recently. They lost an appeal in the UK and as a result were forced to run online and newspaper advertisements claiming Samsung didn’t infringe on said patents.

But it’s a different ball game in the United States. Apple has just added the recently release Galaxy Note 10.1 to the on going lawsuit. To make it more interesting they’ve thrown Android 4.1 to the mix as well. Apple like before claims these two products infringes on their patents (we don’t know which exactly) and are looking to get the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned. The addition of Android 4.1 is what is damning. We might get to see Google and Apple go head to head in the court sooner or later.

That being said what we ‘hope’ to see is all this put to rest. But that would be wishful thinking on our part.

If you’ve been following the Apple vs Samsung battles, and chances are that you are, then you’d be aware of the basis of the whole case. On the tablet side of things Apple claims Samsung copied the iPad design. The design in question is essentially a rectangle with rounded edges. And since the Galaxy Tab series from Samsung uses the same design principle, Apple claims they have a valid case against Samsung.

And if you believed Apple didn’t have a case, then you better believe it now. The famous rectangle with rounded corners patent has just been granted to Apple by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Previous patents on the iPhone designs have included additional features like the home button, but this rectangle with rounded corners patent is just as the name suggests. It gives Apple ownership of what can essentially be seen as an incredibly broad and generic design. A design that millions of tablets use every day, a design that seems far too simple to be owned by anyone.

Is Apple going to use this to sue OEMs? They have already sued Samsung. But this patent opens doors for cases against many other manufacturers as well. Let’s see which way Apple takes it.

If there’s one aspect of smartphones or tablets that has advanced at a breathtaking pace is the processor, both the central processing and the graphical processing. From measly single core CPUs barely reaching the 1GHz mark, we now have quad-core touting Android smartphones with equally fast GPUs. Apple has been at the forefront of chip design. From the A4 in the original iPhone 4 to the A6X in the iPad 4, the A series of SoC from Apple have generally been faster than any competing product from other vendors.

Of course with great power comes great heat dissipation. This latest patent from Apple shows that the company might be planning a radical solution. Mechanical fans in portable devices like the iPhone and iPad. The diagram above shows cooling and alert system with vibrator (136), motor (118), clutch (134), fan (146), and headphone jack air input port (108). Lots more details are given and you can read it here.

With increasingly powerful CPUs, Apple is of the belief that heat will eventually overtake the current passive solutions applied in smartphones. How Apple intends to implement an actual fan cooling system in devices when they seem to be getting thin by the day is something we’d have to wait and see.

The original iPhone changed a lot of things. It made touchscreen phones cool and in fashion. It set the standard for what a full touchscreen phone should and should not have. Manufacturers flocked to copy or beat the iPhone. One of the things that iPhone standardised is the physical packaging that the phone comes in. The small white coloured box is now used by nearly all smartphone OEMs. This new patent filing from Apple shows us what the company intends to do with future iPhone and iPod packaging.

The patent was originally filed in May 2011 but was published today. The image above shows what Apple intends to do. It’s an iPod case with a lid that can be removed and a base that transforms into a dock. The dock seems to be permanently fixed in place. It’s an interesting solution and would save users the task of purchasing an additional dock. How it will be implemented remains to be seen.

But whether this is a patent filing that Apple actually intends to use, or a patent just for the heck of it remains to be seen. For now we’re stuck with regular cardboard boxes which are not nearly as fun.