Apple Wins New iPhone Multitouch Patent, Could Use It In Future Legal Battles

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Apple another important patent that describes “core iPhone multitouch” technology that can now be used by the company to defend its iOS ecosystem especially against the most important threat that’s currently out there, Google’s Android.

Patently Apple reminds us that this is one of the patents Steve Jobs referred to when announcing the original iPhone in 2007 alongside Apple’s intention to defend it:

“We’ve been pushing the state of the art in every facet of this design. We’ve got the multi-touch screen, miniaturization, OS X in a mobile device, precision enclosures, three advanced sensors, desktop class applications, and the widescreen video iPod. We filed over 200 patents for all the inventions in Phone and intend to protect them.”

The multitouch patent that was awarded to Apple actually describes the technology used by Apple in the iPhone and other iOS devices, and insists on the importance of mulitouch support for such devices – a feature not available in smartphones launched before the iPhone – without actually mentioning iOS smartphones:

In general, multi-touch panels may be able to detect multiple touches (touch events or contact points) that occur at or about the same time, and identify and track their locations. Examples of multi-touch panels are described in Applicant’s co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 10/842,862 entitled “Multipoint Touchscreen,” filed on May 6, 2004 and published as U.S. Published Application No. 2006/0097991 on May 11, 2006, the contents of which are incorporated by reference herein.

In view of the above, although this disclosure may describe detecting input in terms of touch-events, it should be understood that the various embodiments disclosed herein may detect near touches or hover-events as well. Accordingly, a touch, a near-touch or a hover may be referred to as an “event” and multiple events that occur at or about the same time may be referred to as a “multi-event.”

Apple doesn’t necessarily refer to the iPhone when detailing how multitouch would work and says that the invention could apply to “desktops, laptops, tablets or handhelds, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), digital music and/or video players and mobile telephones.”

The patent describes how a device using oscillating signal technology would recognize various “events” that occur at the same time on the touchscreen of a device, which could trigger various actions. Without going into the technical details of how such technology works it’s important to note that Apple got the patent, which means some of its direct competitors in the mobile business could be worrying about how the new patent could affect them in the future.

Considering that most, if not all, smartphones that matter for consumer nowadays use multitouch technology, it will be interesting to see not whether Apple will use this patent in new legal battles against some of the companies Apple is already fighting in various worldwide courts including Samsung, HTC and Motorola, but when it will decide to use it.