Patent Reveals Possible Groundbreaking Multi-Touch Features for Apple's iSlate
Now that everyone knows the iSlate is real, the question is: what the hell is this thing going to be like? How will it work? What will wow us about the iSlate that we never really expected?
Context & Ripple Effects
The iSlate is still officially unannounced, but its shape has been assembling in patent filings for most of a year: a February 2009 application sketched a possible tablet PC/MID design, and a late-December report detailed how a multi-touch tactile keyboard might replace physical keys on the device. A week ago, Patently Apple surfaced yet another touch screen technology filing covering iPhone and a MacBook-sized tablet.
This latest MobileCrunch read on the patent stack lands amid a crowded rumor environment — John Gruber's unconfirmed report that the tablet ships without any camera among them — and against a concrete competitor: Gizmodo's September reveal of Microsoft's still-secret Courier tablet. The patents matter because they're currently the only public evidence of what Apple's hardware will actually do.
First-order effects
- Apple gains defensive and offensive positioning in touch-input methods before shipping a single unit — the filings cover interaction models, not just components, which shapes what rivals can build without licensing.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's Courier now heads toward a market where Apple may hold patents on core multi-touch interactions, forcing its designers to either engineer around claimed techniques or accept litigation risk in a category neither company has yet shipped into.
Third-order effects
- If pre-launch patent publication becomes standard practice, the tablet category could be defined in courtrooms and filing offices before it is defined in stores — with input-method patents, rather than specs, deciding whose devices ship with which features.
The trend: Tablet computing is being shaped by a patent race fought in public filings ahead of launch, with Apple and Microsoft staking claims to multi-touch interaction before either device reaches market.