Dropping a smartphone is an inevitability. No matter how ginger and conscientious you purport to be with your beloved phone, it will slip out of your hands, off your lap, or take a flying death leap off your bed — sometimes even shattering the screen in the process.
The Cupertino company has begun to deal with the sad fate of a dropped iPhone, as AppleInsider has uncovered a patent that details a host of smartphone drop protection technologies.
Photo Courtesy Clifford Joseph Kozak
TechCrunch notes that many of the technologies are geared towards shifting the iPhone in mid-air to land screen-up. Some of these components include a mechanism meant to shift the bulk of the weight of the phone's innards to one side and an actual thruster (possibly a deployable gas canister) meant to slow down the rate of fall and even flip the phone over. Other technologies include an air foil to slow down impact and a system that can grip onto the headphone cable and use that to stop the phone from falling.
Also included in the patent is a black-box style technology, which would be able to record the details of the phone's drop — such as how fast and how far it fell. So, not only will Apple be able to tell the details of the fall for technology stress purposes, it would be an easy resource to figure out whether the phone's accident somehow violated the company's warranty.
What do you think of Apple's decision to address the dreaded iPhone drop? Let us know in the comments.
Lauren Hockenson is a tech reporter and 8-bit enthusiast who dreams of being a wizard. She can be found on MyIGN at lhockenson or on Twitter at @lhockenson.
Source : ign[dot]com
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