On April 15, 2008, the US Patent & Trademark Office published five of Apple’s newly granted patents which included one for their Mighty Mouse, an iPod Lanyard, a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), An Exceptional Situation Manager and a design patent relating to a handheld computing device. It is the latter which is perhaps the most intriguing of all, being that the mysterious design has never been utilized by Apple. A design that Apple themselves lists as a possible next generation cell phone amongst other things.

Patent: Handheld Portable Computing Device

According to Apple’s patent, FIG.2 represents a handheld portable computing device which could, for example, “be a media player, media storage device, cellular phone and/or the like.” While the design is established as being filed in the US in 2007, the fact of the matter is that Apple actually registered this design, amongst a whole series of new mini handhelds in Europe in 2006 – as noted in my report of that year (Neo is noted at the bottom of that report). In the 2006 report, there’s clearly an iPhone-Mini design. Apple’s FIG. 2 therefore is unlikely to be that of a cell phone, contrary to the patents suggestions. The design could however be associated with a next generation iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle and/or an Apple TV remote using voice activation and biometrics for security.

Apple lists the following engineers/inventors associated with this design win which was originally filed on July 2, 2007: Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), De Iuliis; Daniele (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Jobs; Steve (Palo Alto, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (San Francisco, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Portola Valley, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA), Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA).

Other Granted Patents: Apple’s other granted patents include one for their Mighty Mouse under Mouse Having an Optically-Based Scrolling Feature (see FIGS 6 and 7 below), one relating to an iPod Lanyard (See FIG. 16 below), one relating to a DAC under Methods and systems for implementing a Digital-to-Analog Converter and the last one titled Specialized processing upon an occurrence of an exceptional situation during the course of a computation, generally relates to exception handling, and specifically to providing a nonstandard desired response to the occurrence of an exceptional situation during a computation.

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or grant is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent applications and/or grants should be read in its entirety for further details.

Written and researched by Neo.