Apple has come up with a series of futuristic ways to protect an iPhone in flight.
On Tuesday, the Cupertino-based company earned a patent for techniques to minimize the beatings electronics take from crash landings. The patent suggests that if you drop your iPhone, the gadget could use sensors to change its orientation, aiming to land on a metal side, rather than a sensitive surface like the screen. In other words, your iPhone phone would virtually bend over backwards to avoid marring its pretty glass face.
If that fails, fans or jets would spring into action to slow the device’s fall, lessening the impact. A gas canister could also be deployed to offset the force of gravity. Meanwhile, the gadget’s most delicate parts – screen, buttons, and switches – would retract before impact to minimize damage.
Sounds roughly like what would happen if James Bond dropped his phone, no?
The patent, which Apple applied for last year, names Fletcher Rothkopf, Colin Ely and Stephen Lynch as inventors.
The techniques described in the patent may foreshadow Apple’s next steps in a long-running project: creating an indestructible iPhone. The company was working with GT Advanced Technologies to manufacture sapphire, one of the hardest materials on earth, for iPhone screens, but the project was derailed when GT filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.
Still, don’t bank on buying an airborne iPhone just yet. As Fortune notes, Apple is famous for applying for patents liberally, even for ideas that may never come to fruition.
Above: Apple has applied for a patent that suggests new ways to protect iPhones when they fall (LiPo Ching, Bay Area News Group).
