Apple patents tend to roll in at a rate of a couple per week. We usually only pick and choose the better of the patents to pass along, but we couldn’t help ourselves when we noticed the awesome patent trifecta this week. So, we rolled all three patents into one post.
Apple Patents their plastic iPad stands
Apple has had some doozy patents in the past, but patenting their in-store iPad stand has to be a new level of bizarre.
If you’ve ever seen one of these things, you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about. It’s a piece of plastic tube cut at an angle. Ok, so that might be making a little bit light of the situation, but after looking at some of the pictures from the patent, we might not be all that far off. Apparently you can patent anything these days.
Ambient light sensor patent
Now on to more important patents. Apple has also patented ambient light sensors and radio on the iPhone. Thankfully, Apple also patents useful things in addition to plastic tubes. The ambient light sensor measures the amount of available light in a room, and then it could possibly turn down the screen brightness, or control the power to the flash for the camera on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Sync-able radio preset patent
The second legitimate and possibly the best patent focuses on coupling an iPhone to an in-vehicle stereo system to share radio presets. While the iPhone doesn’t have a radio built into it just yet, the iPod Nano now does, so it’s probably only a matter of time until someone puts AM/FM into an iPhone. When that happens, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could sync your presets with your car? Imagine having the presets defined on a person to person basis in a car, based on the iPhone, instead of having to define them on the stereo itself. That could make fights over radio control a little safer, and a lot more unfair for the passengers.
Article and Image Credit Via Patently Apple
