Today Apple patented a " converged handheld thingy to do stuff with multimedia" (check out The Register's article on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/07/apple_handheld_thing_patent/)
To quote The Register
"In the submission, published today, Apple says that the invention is a way of operating a handheld device with limited buttons that includes two or more functions including PDA, mobile phone, music player, camera, video player, game player, "handtop" (whatever that is), net terminal, GPS and remote control.
There's aren't many new phones that don't include most of these features, leading to speculation that Apple has come up with a new smartphone user interface. But can it add anything really new?
Multi-tasking, perhaps: the "hand-held electronic device is operable to receive simultaneous inputs from different inputs devices and perform actions based on the simultaneous inputs." Expect Symbian and Microsoft to be burning the midnight oil there. "
Interesting.
Apple pretty much snatched the mobile music industry away from the supposed true heirs, the Discman and 3G Mobile Phone manufacturers. It was not just the iConic iPod wot done it, it was also the disaggregation of the Album (pay by the song at a fixed rate), a great searchable metadata structure, a near-free ride over broadband and a simple to load user interface. The DRM came as a shock, put you'd paid yer money then.
As well as trying to patent something nearly everyone has done already - hell, even I've got stuff from 7 years ago designing these sort of devices - this signals to me that Apple has "got it" in terms of what future mobile media devices will be like. (I also think Nintendo have "got it" by the way).
Now, where did I put that 1999 design for a mobile PC-Phone-MP3 player...hello, US Patent Office.........
