You know that cool little feature that allows the iPhone to tell if you are holding it in straight up or on it’s side? Well, that is because of a little motion sensing device called an accelerometer.
Word on the street is that Research in Motion has a new patent filling describing such a device that can determine if you are holding your BlackBerry in landscape or portrait orientation? The “word” is in Italian and the “street” is in Italy so we we’ve translated a bit of the article for you.
The patent in question is a system that will allow Blackberry understand the orientation (horizontal or vertical), adapting human interface accordingly. The system operates in a manner very similar to the orientation sensor iPhone and iPod Touch, but the simple variation of the vision of content, in the case of Rim could also implement a change in the function.
As BlackBerry Cool pointed out, the FCC database doesn’t list this filing yet, so, we will leave this in the rumor mill category. With all the talk of slide-out keyboards and accelerometers, it sounds like some really interesting BlackBerry designs will be coming out…
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Cripes, I hope they formally announce something before iPhone starts rolling with Exchange support and 3G (in June?). If both of those things come to pass and there’s nothing substantially new from RIM on the horizon, I may jump ship.
Unless they plan on making the screen larger, and moving the keyboard (slide out?), then I don’t see the point. It would be useless on the current models. What the next patent? Handing in the details for the BB to be a snow globe when not in use?
I think that if RIM ever implemented an acceleromerter in a BlackBerry the device would undoubtedly have a full screen display. I know that a lot of people don’t like sliders, however, I think that if they came out with a BlackBerry Slider, which they did patent, motion detection would be a logical thing to add.