Apple Patents for Cooling, Search, Color, Conference Calls

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple was recently granted 6 patents - three of them on May 1st and the remaining three on May 6th. These patents deal with different techniques for conserving power usage in portable gadgets, video conferencing GUI, image color correction, and document search and retrieval system.

Method, System, and Graphical User Interface for Making Conference Calls invention (US Patent 20080100693) discloses embodiments relating to a user interface for call waiting and conference calls. Apple claims that “users are often at a loss as to the sequence of buttons to push in order to switch between calls or to make a conference call.”

This invention relates to a user interface for handling multiple calls and includes displaying images associated with first and second party on a call. According to Apple:

When one call is active and the other call is on hold, the image associated with the party that is on the active call is visually highlighted to make it more visually prominent relative to the other image. When both calls are joined into a conference call, both images are displayed adjacent to each other and neither is visually highlighted relative to the other.

Thin, Passive Cooling System invention (US Patent 20080101026) deals with challenges to manage a thermal load to maintain acceptable internal and external operating temperatures for portable electronic devices, such as laptop computers, cellular phones, and personal digital assistants. Hence, Apple claims that what’s needed are electronic devices that include compact and passive cooling mechanisms that overcome these challenges. According to Apple:

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that includes a power source and a heat-shield mechanism which encloses the power source. This heat-shield mechanism includes a 3-dimensional housing that defines a cavity in which the power source resides, and a plate that is positioned to cover an opening to the cavity defined by an edge of the housing.

The system operates to ensure a temperature on an outer surface of the system is less than a first pre-determined value and/or a temperature inside of the heat-shield mechanism is less than a second pre-determined value.

Embedded thermal-electric cooling modules invention (US Patent 20080101038) covers issues relating to solid-state cooling components that reduce surface temperatures in computer systems. For example, many laptop users are forced to position their notebooks to avoid annoying hot spot on a bottom surface of their computers. According to Apple:

A portable computing device includes a housing having an external surface and an inner surface. A solid-state cooling mechanism in the computing device is coupled to the inner surface. This solid-state cooling mechanism is configured to maintain a temperature difference across at least a portion of the external surface that is less than a pre-determined value.

Multi-language document search and retrieval system invention (US Patent 7369987) is directed to the indexing and searching of text in documents for information retrieval purposes, and more particularly to an indexing and searching system that is capable of handling text in any of a plurality of languages. According to Apple:

A multi-lingual indexing and search system performs tokenization and stemming in a manner which is independent of whether index entries and search terms appear as words in a dictionary for a given language. During the tokenization phase of the process, a string of text is separated into individual word tokens. Pre-determined types of tokens, known as junk tokens and stop words, are eliminated from further processing. As a further step, characters with diacritical marks are converted into corresponding unmarked lower case letters, to eliminate match errors that might result from incorrectly accented words.

Methods and apparatuses for restoring color and enhancing electronic images invention (US Patent 7369699) relates to color correction, and more particularly to color restoration and enhancement for electronic color images. According to Apple:

…signals for individual channels of an image (e.g., red, green, or blue) are adjusted based on a weighted set of averages…pixels with extreme values of color signals (e.g., pure black or white pixels) are ignored for the purposes of restoring color; and, the different averages are weighted according to the pixel location… color restoration for individual channels, the luminance of each pixel is adjusted back to their original levels; and the range of luminance of the image is further adjusted to provide improved brightness and contrast, where in determining the luminance the red, green and blue color channels are given an equal weight.

Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor invention (US Patent 7370216) provides a system that facilitates reducing static power consumption of a processor. According to Apple:

During operation, the system receives a signal indicating that instruction execution within the processor is to be temporarily halted. In response to this signal, the system halts an instruction-processing portion of the processor, and reduces the voltage supplied to the instruction-processing portion of the processor. Full voltage is maintained to a remaining portion of the processor, so that the remaining portion of the processor can continue to operate while the instruction-processing portion of the processor is in reduced power mode.