How smart’s your smartphone? Not this smart, we’d bet!
Apple’s most recently revealed patent suggests that a future iPhone (possibly iPhone 6) could be so smart that it could adjust its own centre of mass to better protect it against a clumsy crash landing. Dropping our mobile is something that happens to us all (some more than others) and the California company’s design for a ‘Protective Mechanism for an Electronic Device’ has been filed with the U.S Patent and Trademark Office.
This mechanism would involve a sensor within the iPhone casing detecting when the handset is released and is falling. As it approaches the ground, the sensor quickly allows the phone to shifts its mass, rotating the gadget mid-drop so that it redirects the bump to a less vital area of the phone. This makes for a less critical collision, however the phone may still have a few unavoidable scuffs but you should be able to turn it back on again and use the functions as normal.
The patent design refers to the iPhone by name but we expect the system would be introduced across the range with Apple’s iPad and iPod also installed with the intelligent tech.
One of the most common haphazard ways of a device meeting a premature demise is being dropped in the toilet bowl, so our next challenge for Apple is to design an iPhone that can not only take a bump but also comes with a floatation system!