Can science save your iPhone screen?

So we all love our iPhones and we try to be as careful as we can with them, BUT accidents happen and one day your iPhone could end up face down on the floor with a horribly cracked screen! Never fear, Apple has yet again dreamt up a way to keep its glass screens from cracking…

On Tuesday Apple was granted a patent (approved by the U.S.Patent and Trademark Office) that details technology that would change your iPhone’s angle if it’s in free fall, basically it would make your iPhone fall like a cat. If you own a cat and you've ever seen your precious Mr. Jinxy fall from quite a height, you’d have noticed that he has a righting reflex. This is a natural ability for the animal to orient itself in mid-air so that it lands on its feet and doesn't hurt itself, now Apple has applied the exact same logic to its devices like the iPhone and the iPad.

Apple’s main goal is to break the fall and protect the valuable parts of the phone - obviously the screen! According to the patent there will be built-in technology that could estimate a point of impact and then shift the iPhone’s centre of gravity in order to save the device from a horrifying death.

But how does all this work? Well, by using the iPhone’s inner vibration motor and processor the device would be able to rotate before it hits the floor and then the sensors would work in tandem with the more complex parts (accelerometers and gyroscopes) to position the phone properly.

Yes, we want to protect our devices from an early grave, but if you read the patent, they have some pretty strange ideas! One example is that your iPhone could latch onto or eject headphone cables while it falls; there is also an idea of a weird “thrust mechanism” that uses a gas canister to change the phones position.

One of the biggest problems we have with our mobile devices is spider cracks running along our screens. Anything is possible, but the chances you’ll ever see this become a reality are slim, but wouldn't it be great to have a cat-like iPhone? 

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Written By: Christine Romans
Copy Writer at The Computer Guyz Cape Town