Yet another item from the fanciful land of patent filings: the “Hybrid Portrait-Landscape Handheld Device With Trackball Navigation and Qwerty Hideaway Keyboard”. It might be thought that the whole hideaway keypad and orientation detection thing has been done, but obviously not with a trackball, otherwise this filing wouldn’t have gone through. Considering another patent of this variety has been released recently, it’s easy to get enthusiastic about the idea of a BlackBerry with significant form factor changes. For the bookish, you can check out the whole patent filing here.
Tag Archive for 'patent'
Our friends at BlackBerry Cool have posted some information on a escalating war of lawyers between Motorola and RIM.
Motorola sued RIM, claiming that RIM is using 7 Motorola patents without permission. RIM sued right back with 9 claims of patent infringement, and accused Motorola of refusing to license some of their patents in a “fair and reasonable” manner.
Neither company appears to be winning so far, so we’ll just have to wait and see where this one goes.
Our friends over at BlackBerry Cool posted about RIM publishing a new patent for a touchscreen LTD.
The patent is called System and Method for Integrating A Touchscreen Within an LCD. It works by detecting displacement within the liquid crystal display and routing that data to software within the device. The patent was published 4 months after it was filed, in contrast to the usual 18 month gap, which could indicate that the technology will be used sooner rather than later.
This is definitely something to keep an eye on.
A company named Minerva Industries has been issued a patent for what is essentially a smartphone, and wasted no time in suing nearly every smartphone-producing company, discovered Techdirt.
The patent covers a “mobile entertainment and communication device” which includes a phone, Internet connectivity, memory for downloads, a camera and microphone, and some sort of GPS functionality. Sounds like a smartphone to me. The minute the patent was issued, the company sued Apple, Nokia, RIM, AT&T, HP, Motorola, HTC, Helio, Sony Ericsson and even more.
Companies often settle out of court rather than going through the incredible legal hassle behind these types of suits, so this is not the first time an overly-broad patent has been used to rake in cash.