Next in your iPhone OS
Apple guys do keep themselves busy thinking up new ways how to improve their iPhone OS software. And Apple's patent applications give us a glimpse of how they may go about it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest installment in a small but persistent beat: reading Apple's patent filings as previews of unreleased iPhone OS work. Unwired View ran a similar exercise back in June 2007 with its roundup of early iPhone developments, and this week's filings — picked up the same day by AppleInsider as a story on an ID app and other "potential iPhone enhancements" — show the practice had become routine within two years of the device launching.
The filings land amid confirmed reporting that reviewers praise the iPhone 3GS's near-HD video recording and YouTube uploads, alongside an unconfirmed claim that Apple may add micro projectors to iPhones and iPod touches as rising storage leads users to carry more video. The software-patent story and the hardware rumors point the same direction: Apple treating the phone as a media capture-and-display platform.
First-order effects
- Apple has publicly disclosed filings describing an ID app and other possible iPhone OS enhancements — none of which are announced products, so the immediate effect is informational: rivals, developers, and the enthusiast press get a legal record of what Apple is exploring.
Second-order effects
- Competing handset makers gain free roadmap intelligence from the filings, while a specialist press ecosystem around parsing Apple patents (outlets like AppleInsider and Patently Apple) gets fresh material that sustains daily coverage between product launches.
Third-order effects
- If filing-as-signal becomes the norm, patent applications harden into a semi-official preview channel — and the accumulating stockpile of interface and software patents positions Apple for future licensing and infringement disputes over smartphone features.
The trend: Consumer-tech companies' routine patent filings are turning into a de facto product-preview channel that the enthusiast press mines between launches.