Did They Really Blow It Steve? One Stylus Patent Says Otherwise
by Jace
February 3, 2011
Remember when Steve Jobs sat on stage and uttered his famous, “If you see a stylus, they blew it?” I know I do, and rumor has it the company at 1 Infinite Loop is pulling a mulligan on those eight words and is taking another gander into the aforementioned technology. With the release of HP’s Digital Sketch launching in March, the pressure is now back on Apple to stay competitive, and according to a newly discovered patent making its way around the web, the company is doing just that.
According to the patent, the stylus is possibly powered with a conductive disk on the replaceable tip. The key word that should have all of you Wacom fans especially jazzed is the word “powered.” This could possibly give your iDevice the extra creative toolbox that you have been missing. Forget the days of that dastardly Pogo Stylus not being able to change your brush size based on pressure, or forgo the extra steps necessary to undo that unfortunate misplaced brush stroke. With this patent floating around those days could someday be over.
With a powered stylus, Patently Apple had these hopeful features in mind.
In some embodiments, the stylus could include one or more embedded accelerometers adapted to transmit positional information to the touch sensor panel. Positional information generated by the capacitive elements 300 may be synthesized with the accelerometer data by a processor in the host device in order to derive the precise region of contact upon the touch surface…What features would you like to see with a powered stylus? Let us hear your thoughts in the comments.
