Last November, LG surprised South Korean television viewers with an ad for a digitally-rendered “Drone Phone” that was shown to fly around and take photos from the air. Commentators interpreted the video as little more than a clever marketing stunt, but based on one of the company’s latest patent filings, its interest in the drone…
Tag: mobile
Samsung has a new vision for bendable touch devices
In 2011, Samsung captured consumers’ imagination with an experimental screen that could be bent at will without hurting the display quality. Six years and hundreds of patent applications later, the South Korean mobile giant has reportedly reached a point where it’s all but ready to bring the technology to market. The question that now occupies…
The Supreme Court will hear Samsung and Apple’s iPhone dispute in October
The tech industry usually doesn’t pay much attention to the happenings at the U.S. Supreme Court, but the October case schedule that was released last Thursday managed to generate a lot of buzz. The agenda includes an oral hearing of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. vs. Apple Inc. No. 15-777, a long-running patent dispute that could have…
Microsoft has found a way to halve the size of mobile cameras
Microsoft’s mobile engineers appear to be paying close attention to the work of their peers over at its application development business. In that world, if a certain component is used multiple times throughout a project, you simply split it off into a standalone library that is shared among the other program files to avoid burdening…
Qualcomm has designed a touch sensor for holographic phones
One of the best measures of a trend’s progress in the consumer electronics world is the reaction of the component suppliers. If the suppliers start taking concrete steps towards addressing it, then they anticipate demand from their manufacturing clients, who in turn must be anticipating demand from consumers. That’s why it’s such an encouraging sign that…
LG is taking holograms mobile
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…
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…
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…
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…