This past week, Apple was awarded patents for both situational awareness functions on its devices and location-sharing to third-parties from its devices.
Situational awareness interestingly combines your activities with automatic phone responses. What this means is that if you go into a restaurant, it might switch your phone to silent or if you are on an airplane, it can recognize that and switch it to airplane mode. However, there are a few critiques of this new patent, considering if certain settings are met and the situational awareness features are turned on when you don't want them to be, that could be a problem. Maybe you call someone by accident or the device turns your GPS on when you enter a car, but you don't want to waste battery or data. There are clearly issues that can arise with this new patent, although I'm sure Apple will be able to solve them. It would be interesting to see this developed because this is actually a really good idea and would make for a much more intuitive phone experience.
The second patent, location sharing to third-parties is supposedly related to the eventual release of the iWatch. That way, the iWatch doesn't need any GPS tracking devices on it, it can just receive the information from the Iphone. This could prove to be very useful later on in helping to create much thinner devices and making it easier to transfer data.
Overall, these patents seem to indicate that Apple will be coming out with some new and interesting features for their products in the near future. We can only wait to see what Apple creates.
Here is the link to the original article:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/26/apple-patents-situational-awareness-and-location-information-sharing-for-mobile-devices/
No comments:
Post a Comment