Samsung is no longer the one only mobile holography game in town. Only a few short months after a patent application revealed that the Seoul-based electronics giant is experimenting with miniaturized projection technology that could allow its phones to display content several inches ahead of the screen, cross-city rival LG has filed over a dozen…
Category: Gadgets
IBM is bringing the corporate world’s unbreakable encryption to your phone
As any first-year computer science undergraduate could tell you, the rigid programming of current software prevents applications from taking any truly random actions. That requires important corporate systems like the mainframes processing your payments to tap physical parameters such as light and background radiation to generate cryptographic sequences that hackers can’t theoretically predict. The technology has been around…
Samsung’s future phone covers will irradiate your screen to clear germs
The competition in the emerging mobile health segment could soon move beyond apps into the physical realm if Samsung follows through on one of its latest patent applications. Detailed inside is a new kind of phone cover that employs technology from the industrial world to clear your screen of germs and other foreign substances every…
Patent filling reveals the Samsung Galaxy S7 iris scanner
The amount of effort that Samsung is putting into building a homegrown iris scanner leaves little room for guesswork about the authentication mechanism in its next generation of mobile devices. The rapid progress on the project has been chronicled in its sprawling paper trail of patent applications, which passed a new milestone on Thursday with…
LG’s radical smart glasses wrap a battery around your neck
Manufacturers have been experimenting with exotic wearable designs for a quite while now in an effort to stand out from the growing competition, but LG’s latest entry may just take the cake. It’s a regular pair of smart glasses save for an oversized external battery that hangs over your shoulders like a sort of high-tech necklace.…
Sony's cylindrical display will shake up wearables
Wearables have evolved unrecognizably from the original wristwatches of the early 19th century, but manufacturers still have ship their hardware attached to low-tech wristbands for lack of a better option. The first exception may be Sony, which hopes to exploit recent advancements in display technology to break out of the trend line. Revealed in one of the…
Here’s the rugged Surface Pro Microsoft designed for the NFL
The NFL takes note-taking very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that its technology division gave Microsoft a $400 million contract last year to supply every coach with a specially-created rugged edition of the Surface Pro for that very purpose, the specifications of which recently surfaced on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s online database. The…
Samsung has averted the mobile industry’s indium shortage crisis
The proliferation of mobile devices is something of a double-edged sword for manufacturers. On one hand, Apple once again beat sales expectations in its most recent fiscal quarter, but on the other, the enormous demand is rapidly depleting global reserves of the precious metals needed to build the touchscreens common to every smartphone and tablet. At particular…
Google's Dropcam wants to take its wireless cameras outdoors
Not many startups would consider being acquired by one of the world’s largest tech companies as getting “chopped off in the knees”, but that’s been the sentiment at Dropcam ever since its sale to Google for half a billion dollars last year. Or at least since its co-founder and technical lead, Greg Duffy, quit a few…
Samsung’s smart TVs will intelligently zoom when you squint
A new set of specifications that surfaced on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s online database last week reveals that Samsung is taking another shot at applying eye-tracking technology to TVs after its failed attempt to develop a gaze-aware remote, and on a much grander scale. If its efforts bear fruit this time, watching video could get a lot…
Microsoft once considered putting an electric shocker in its wearables
One of the last remnants of Steve Ballmer’s legacy at Microsoft surfaced this week in a patent filing originally filed early last year seeking the rights to a notification mechanism for wearable devices that administers electric shocks in the name of convenience. The logic is surprisingly sound, if you can ignore the constant prospect of a zap…
Remember the “tall iPhone” parody? Samsung is applying for the rights to make it in real life
It appears that the industrial designers over at Samsung have expanded their creative horizons beyond Apple products to include parodies of Apple products as well, one of which in particular they’ve spent a great deal of effort recreating in a recent patent filing. The result is a retractable monstrosity of a display that could up the ante…
This smart slap bracelet can turn into a phone (or a backscratcher, depending how you look at it)
The 40-year history of the prestigious Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea has reached its culmination. Many more inventions will come out of its doors over the coming years, but nothing will be able to match the glory that is the back-scratching wristband phone revealed in its latest patent filing. The original idea…
Here’s the ambitious smart TV controller Samsung axed after two years of development
The irony is hard to miss. On the very same day that Variety broke the news Samsung has killed off a secretive internal program to develop a new kind of remote meant to change the way you interact with your TV, one of the first patents from the effort moved a major step closer towards regulatory…