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Apple gears up for battle over touchscreens
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ETHAN MILLER/GETTY
TECHNOLOGY
Multi-touch battles begin WITH numerous rivals to the iPhone expected to be launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next week, Apple says it will defend the device’s touch-screen technology should anybody dare to copy it. But an aggressive legal battle would be a mistake, say technology analysts. On an iPhone, you can zoom in on part of the screen by moving two fingers apart and zoom out by moving them back together. Apple acquired this multi-touch technology along with a collection of patents when it bought a firm called FingerWorks. Until early January, only the iPhone had multi-touch technology, but both Palm (left) and Toshiba have since announced multi-touch phones. Geoff Blaber, an analyst at market research firm CCS Insight in London, says he expects many more multi-touch phones to emerge at Barcelona –
largely based on Google’s Android open-source software platform. Firms like Palm and Nokia have their own patent portfolios on these technologies, Blaber adds: “There are often workarounds that let firms achieve the same touch-screen capabilities in different ways. Who
“It would be a very dangerous move for Apple to begin robustly defending its patents” owns the intellectual property is unclear – it’s very murky territory.” Blaber suggests Apple would be unwise to mount a lawsuit. “It would be a very dangerous move for Apple to begin robustly defending patents here because it is a very new area.” Such action could prompt rivals to file costly counter-suits, he says.
–More ways to stay in touch –
Taking wing for a better solar cell
Life’s no beach for robot rovers
THE light-scattering structures that make butterfly wings so striking could be used to make cheaper, more efficient solar cells. In dye-sensitised solar cells a dye coating on a titanium dioxide surface forms a “photoanode” that absorbs photons and pumps out electrons. To improve their efficiency, Di Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and colleagues borrowed the lightabsorbing properties of the wings of the Paris peacock butterfly. After soaking samples of the wing in a titanium-containing solution, they processed it to produce a titanium dioxide deposit that reproduced the wing’s honeycomb structure (Chemistry of Materials, DOI: 10.1021/cm702458p). When this was used to make a photoanode, the resulting cell’s efficiency was 10 per cent higher than normal.
IT’S not just humans who find it difficult to run on sand. Even the most nimble robots struggle when faced with a stretch of the white stuff. Planetary rovers and earthbound rescue robots often need to travel across varying terrain, including sand and rubble. So Daniel Goldman, a biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, investigated what makes these surfaces such a challenge. His team studied a robot called Sandbot – which has six C-shaped legs and scampers across hard
4m
The number of CCTV cameras in the UK. Meanwhile, the DNA of 7 per cent of its citizens is stored in a national database
ground with the agility of a cockroach – as it waded through a bath full of poppy seeds. The density of the seeds was controlled by blowing air through the bath. They found that if Sandbot’s limbs moved a fraction too fast, or if the researchers loosened the packing between the grains even slightly, the robot would quickly switch from a walking motion to an ineffectual swim as it sank deep into the material. He believes the answer is for robots to be built with sensors that detect how compact a surface is, and to vary their limb motion accordingly (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809095106).
“It’s as simple as drawing a watch on your arm” Pattie Maes explains how to find the time using a new kind of “digital sixth sense” that she and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab showed off at the TED 2009 conference in Long Beach, California, last week (Wired.com, 5 February)
14 February 2009 | NewScientist | 19
ETHAN MILLER/GETTY
TECHNOLOGY
Multi-touch battles begin WITH numerous rivals to the iPhone expected to be launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, next week, Apple says it will defend the device’s touch-screen technology should anybody dare to copy it. But an aggressive legal battle would be a mistake, say technology analysts. On an iPhone, you can zoom in on part of the screen by moving two fingers apart and zoom out by moving them back together. Apple acquired this multi-touch technology along with a collection of patents when it bought a firm called FingerWorks. Until early January, only the iPhone had multi-touch technology, but both Palm (left) and Toshiba have since announced multi-touch phones. Geoff Blaber, an analyst at market research firm CCS Insight in London, says he expects many more multi-touch phones to emerge at Barcelona –
largely based on Google’s Android open-source software platform. Firms like Palm and Nokia have their own patent portfolios on these technologies, Blaber adds: “There are often workarounds that let firms achieve the same touch-screen capabilities in different ways. Who
“It would be a very dangerous move for Apple to begin robustly defending its patents” owns the intellectual property is unclear – it’s very murky territory.” Blaber suggests Apple would be unwise to mount a lawsuit. “It would be a very dangerous move for Apple to begin robustly defending patents here because it is a very new area.” Such action could prompt rivals to file costly counter-suits, he says.
–More ways to stay in touch –
Taking wing for a better solar cell
Life’s no beach for robot rovers
THE light-scattering structures that make butterfly wings so striking could be used to make cheaper, more efficient solar cells. In dye-sensitised solar cells a dye coating on a titanium dioxide surface forms a “photoanode” that absorbs photons and pumps out electrons. To improve their efficiency, Di Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and colleagues borrowed the lightabsorbing properties of the wings of the Paris peacock butterfly. After soaking samples of the wing in a titanium-containing solution, they processed it to produce a titanium dioxide deposit that reproduced the wing’s honeycomb structure (Chemistry of Materials, DOI: 10.1021/cm702458p). When this was used to make a photoanode, the resulting cell’s efficiency was 10 per cent higher than normal.
IT’S not just humans who find it difficult to run on sand. Even the most nimble robots struggle when faced with a stretch of the white stuff. Planetary rovers and earthbound rescue robots often need to travel across varying terrain, including sand and rubble. So Daniel Goldman, a biophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, investigated what makes these surfaces such a challenge. His team studied a robot called Sandbot – which has six C-shaped legs and scampers across hard
4m
The number of CCTV cameras in the UK. Meanwhile, the DNA of 7 per cent of its citizens is stored in a national database
ground with the agility of a cockroach – as it waded through a bath full of poppy seeds. The density of the seeds was controlled by blowing air through the bath. They found that if Sandbot’s limbs moved a fraction too fast, or if the researchers loosened the packing between the grains even slightly, the robot would quickly switch from a walking motion to an ineffectual swim as it sank deep into the material. He believes the answer is for robots to be built with sensors that detect how compact a surface is, and to vary their limb motion accordingly (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809095106).
“It’s as simple as drawing a watch on your arm” Pattie Maes explains how to find the time using a new kind of “digital sixth sense” that she and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab showed off at the TED 2009 conference in Long Beach, California, last week (Wired.com, 5 February)
14 February 2009 | NewScientist | 19