Items tagged with Patent
With the smartphone market becoming saturated with competent devices that can easily meet the needs of most consumers, OEMs are looking for new innovations to attract sales. We've seen larger edge-to-edge displays, in-display fingerprint readers, and an increasing number of cameras (both front- and rear-facing). A newly uncovered Xiaomi patent showcases a new display innovation that could be used for future smartphones. The patent shows a smartphone with a full edge-to-edge display. What's remarkable about this particular patent, however, is that while today's flagships still have small...
Read more...
The release of Tesla’s Autopilot Hardware 3.0 is just around the corner and the automotive firm has made a number of significant changes with this upgrade. A series of recent patents have confirmed that Tesla will utilize a new artificial intelligence chip, or “neural net accelerator”. This will replace the NVIDIA hardware that is currently used in the Autopilot 2.0 platform and should enable full self-driving capabilities in the future. Why is Tesla working on a new AI chip? According to the patent filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, “Processing...
Read more...
A relatively recent trend in the smartphone space is to implement dual cameras on the backside of the handset, which enables some nifty depth-of-field effects through hardware (rather than software alone). Some phones even wield four rear cameras, like Huawei's Mate 20 Pro. Well, LG apparently has aspirations of boasting the most cameras on a single phone, with a patent filing pointing to four times as many rear camera sensors as the Mate 20 Pro. That's right, LG filed a patent that discusses a 16-camera arrangement, which would be the most ever on a smartphone if it comes to fruition. How can...
Read more...
Is it too early to speculate about the Galaxy S10, or even the Galaxy S11? Heck no! Display innovations loom right around the corner, and while Samsung is getting ready to announce a foldable smartphone—the Galaxy F or Galaxy X—it has other tricks up its sleeve. A recent patent application details some of what Samsung has in mind, and we hope they find their way into the next flagship Galaxy device. To be clear, the Galaxy F or Galaxy X (or whatever Samsung ends up calling it) is not a flagship phone. Instead, Samsung is toying around with a unique design and hoping that developers...
Read more...
A new Microsoft patent application has emerged that Redmond filed on May 1, 2017, but was only published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on November 1, 2018. The patent application shows an interesting feature that might turn up on a future version of the Surface Pro. The feature is a second supplemental display on the back of the Surface device that Microsoft has dubbed a "reflective display" and it would sit right above the hinge for the kickstand on the back. The abstract on the patent explains the screen would be a reflective multi-layer structure that forms an external surface...
Read more...
Apple and Qualcomm aren’t exactly friends, but in some ways, the two firms need each other. iPhones are among the top-selling smartphones in the world, and Qualcomm certainly wants to get in on that sales action. Apple needs Qualcomm modems because they typically outperform rival hardware from Intel and MediaTek, and its customers want the best hardware for their money. Apple has sought out hardware from other sources with company implementing Intel modems in their latest crop of iPhones recently and has threatened to use MediaTek in the past. And now it seems Qualcomm is accusing Apple...
Read more...
Microsoft has an idea for a hinged Surface device with dual screens that was seen in patent drawings back in July. This device would go a long way towards giving users more screen space while maintaining a portable form factor. This week a new patent application has surfaced, and that it gives us another glimpse at what Microsoft is cooking up for its hinged, dual-screen device. The device would have a hinge in the center covered with a flexible display across the two sections of the machine; the hinge looks similar to what Microsoft is using for the Surface Book. Patent drawings show the device...
Read more...
Nintendo is riding a wave of nostalgic gaming right now, and that wave is bringing in the money. The Nintendo Switch continues to sell well, and Nintendo's small, retro consoles like the NES Classic and SNES Classic are very popular with gamers. However, the company is underrepresented in the smartphone arena. While there are a few Nintendo games on the Android and iOS platforms, it looks like more may be coming. Nintendo has filed a patent application for a Game Boy Casing for touchscreen devices, and what use is a Game Boy case without Game Boy games? The case appears to be sized for a smartphone,...
Read more...
Apple has lost an ongoing patent battle against a Canadian patent holding firm called WiLan. WiLan proudly announced that it won a judgement against Apple to the tune of $145.1 million after it was found that the company's iPhone family infringed upon a pair of patents. That is most certainly a fraction of a drop in the massive Scrooge McDuck-like coffers over at Apple, but it is still a large sum of money. The patents involved include No. 8,457,145 and No. 8,537,757. That first patent is titled "Method and apparatus for bandwidth request/grant protocols in a wireless communication system."...
Read more...
Apple has been fighting Qualcomm over patents that the iPhone allegedly violates. Qualcomm filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) previously, and a panel has recommended that a trade judge find that Apple infringed on at least one of these patents. If the judge does rule that Apple infringed on the patent, there is a chance that the import of some iPhone devices into the United States could be blocked. More than likely any ruling that Apple violated patents would simply mean a licensing fee paid by Apple to keep a steady flow of iPhone coming into...
Read more...
Nintendo has been selling Switch consoles in droves pushing its earnings to record levels. Months back, a company called Gamevice took issue with Nintendo and filed a patent infringement suit against the Switch for allegedly infringing on patents relating to how controllers attach to the sides of an electronic device. While the Switch controllers attach only to the Switch console, the Gamevice patent has to do with controllers that attach to each side of its Wikipad gaming tablet and detachable controllers for third-party tablets. Gamevice eventually dropped the lawsuit for unknown reasons. That...
Read more...
When it comes to cryptocurrency mining, many small- and large-scale outfits have cornered the GPU market, buying up large quantities of current generation AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. Gamers have especially been hit hard by miners, as even mainstream graphics cards that should be heading towards the bargain bin at this stage in their lifecycle are priced above MSRP. However, it looks as though Intel might have come up with a solution for a way to more efficiently mine for cryptocurrency instead of using hardware that was originally designed for an unrelated task. Intel's patent was filed on September...
Read more...
LG has a new patent that is making the rounds that shows a device with a dual purpose. The patent describes the device as a "mobile phone with a flexible display which can be folded in half." The original filing for the patent was in July of 2017, and the patent was just published on January 12, 2018. There are two different versions of the device on the patent with the first being a folding phone that has a camera on the back panel. When this device is folded, information like time can be displayed on the front screen. The second device in the patent app features a sidebar that can display time...
Read more...
A new patent app has turned up that shows what Amazon is working on in the clothing space, and it's quite interesting. One big challenge for Amazon when it comes to selling clothing online is allowing people to see what the clothing looks like on their own body. This isn't something that Amazon can do right now and is a big reason some shoppers cite for continued use of brick and mortar retail stores. Naturally, some of those users go try on the clothing in the retail store and still buy on Amazon, but other end up buying in that retail store and Amazon obviously doesn’t like that. Amazon's...
Read more...
