Among a bundle of approximately 40 patents granted to Apple Inc. (AAPL) today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, one of the most notable is an advanced inductive charging pad. This patent, No. 8,645,604, entitled “Device Orientation Based Docking Functions,” describes a docking system whose inductive surface performs different functions depending on how the user positions their iPhone or other mobile device atop it.
Known more concisely as a “smart dock,” the newly patented invention would include its own processor to handle the sophisticated functions built into it. Sensors would also be present to detect how a mobile device placed atop it was oriented – face-up, face-down, aligned in a specific way relative to the dock’s edges, and so on. User feedback would be presented on a small screen, enabling users to switch functions for the various orientations, if they preferred some other set of positions to the default, built-in ones.
Some of the functions envisioned by the Apple Inc. patent filing include charging a mobile device, uploading or downloading data between it and the host computer, diagnostics, and so on. The document suggests that the precise placement of a mobile device on the smart dock could even be arranged to open specific apps on the Mac desktop, such as iTunes. Though touched on only obliquely in the text, the accompanying diagrams show that at least two mobile devices such as smartphones could be charged at the same time on the inductive surface.
Another standout feature of Apple Inc.’s new smart dock design is its apparent reliance on wireless charging via magnetic resonance. Though wireless charging has already existed for some time, its use in the dock would increase the device’s flexibility further. Command inputs would be achieved via a microphone and voice recognition. The patent is filed in the name of Jorge S. Fino, a specialist in “Human Interface Design.”
The smart dock was only the most dramatic of several dozen patents awarded today to the Cupertino technology enterprise. The rest are not patents for complete devices or device concepts, however, but for methods of achieving specific functionalities within larger systems, improvements to existing features, fresh approaches to syncing, and so forth. The electronics firm has received well over 100 patents thus far in 2014, putting it on track to equal or exceed the roughly 2,000 patents it was granted in 2013.
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