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Jeff Bezos’ new patent envisions tablets without processors, batteries
- tokipin 14y agopretty sure this has prior art in Avatar
- meepmorp 14y agoBadly phrased headline - there is no patent, yet. This is just an application. One which, with enough public input and complaining, will hopefully never be granted.
- bdfh42 14y agoTo quote the post "Transferring power and data wirelessly to displays as described in the patent is currently infeasible" So you can get a patent on something you actually have not invented? Just something you would like to invent - or perhaps prefer that someone else invents so you can then milk them for royalties. The world has truly gone crazy.
- silverlight 14y agoI completely agree. We can argue all day long about whether or not things like software patents are good. But I think the very minimum bar to file a patent should be "we actually made a prototype of this that does what we're claiming."
- Cakez0r 14y agoAt the very least, it's perfectly reasonable to expect schematics for how a prototype could be built.
- acgourley 14y agoIt is supposed to be good enough that someone "skilled in the art" could build it after reading the patent.
- akiselev 14y agoThe problem is that when they say "wireless" what they mean is that they enumerated every possible wireless tech and probably any future tech. With WiFi alone a tablet that is using the tablet equivalent of OnLive is possible.
- chrischen 14y agoThat probably means that the concepts you describe have to be common knowledge to those skilled in the art... basically a commodity. But what is described in this patent is unfeasible and whoever discovers the implementation could be only one of few who could do it.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoOr maybe something you don't want invented. Patent it, then, when it is invented, charge licensing royalties so high that it can't reasonably be created. Maybe that's the route to global peace: just imagine weapons, start patenting them, and charge trillions for licensing.
- ryusage 14y agoUnfortunately, once the thing can be made, it will be, somewhere. If it's not legal, but people want it, then it will be made in secret.
- Too 14y agoWell, if you don't have enough resources to develop it yourself you might have to get external funding and to make sure your backers don't steal the idea and produce it themselves you patent it. Isn't this how patents are supposed to protect small independent innovators? If it works or not I'm not qualified to answer. Still, i think that at least some form of prototype must be available or must be demonstrated within a certain timeframe. And the patent in question here is just ridiculous. Wireless displays must exist already?
- reeses 14y agoAs long as the precondition is infeasible, I'm happy to let him have his 20 years of patent protection. Or, he has safe, wireless, power distribution in his hip pocket and wants to patent all the derivatives and applications before the big reveal. Now that I think about it, I'm really OK with that one.
- Payrovk 14y agoThis sounds like Doctor Who's psychic paper.
- luu 14y agoIsn't it odd that this is patentable? One day, long before this patent expires, all of the technology needed for this will be commonplace, and the idea will be obvious to any four year old. I've heard that the point of patents is to incent innovation, but it's hard to see how that's happening here. It's not the case, as with pharmaceutical research, that R&D resources had to be spent to generate the idea, demonstrate its efficacy, and prove its safety. That will be needed for the technology required to implement this, but, this patent actually reduces the incentive to spend R&D resources on the technology necessary to implement it!
- Zimahl 14y agoIt's very odd. At this point Bezos is patenting something that (probably) doesn't exist in the hopes someone does build it or his team can build it. It would be like someone realizing that we could send out electrical signals from a transmitter and catch them on a receiver. What would the radio guys have patented? They actually built a radio, the patent is for a broad idea. If anyone brings this to fruition this should be invalidated. Someone must've patented wireless electric transmission decades ago (maybe even Tesla?) and having wifi for the content is even less special. EDIT: typo.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThis is what annoyed me about this patent as well, its like saying "Dibs!" if someone can build this thing, we own it! Seriously? I'd write more but I'm busy writing up patents on Phase Conduits and Deflector arrays.
- arethuza 14y agoActually, using patents in that way seems to have a long history - Feynman mentions something about having his name on a patent for nuclear powered aircraft in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman".
- maximilianburke 14y ago
- ebbv 14y agoNot only is this not possible right now it's also a dumb idea. So now instead of having one device that's easily portable to anywhere you want to go, you have the device plus a base station that you have to carry around. Oh boy! What an improvement!
- dhimes 14y agoMy guess is that the base station will power many devices and be located such as routers are now. So, for instance, an office may have a base station that powers its employees' devices as they wander from room to room.
- ebbv 14y agoWhat about using it in the car? What about using it in a restaurant? A hotel room? Are you really telling me that the Amazon base stations are going to be ubiquitous? It's a bad design.
- dhimes 14y agoJust because it doesn't work in a car doesn't make it a bad design. Television doesn't work in most cars, but people still buy them. Something doesn't have to solve every use case to be useful. FWIW, I tend to agree with you. I think the better problem to solve would be to have electrical energy generative/storage devices. But I've been wrong about these things in the past so I try to second-guess myself.
- ebbv 14y agoExcept this is meant to supplant a design that DOES work in the car, that's why it's stupid.
- bsbechtel 14y agoI just skimmed the article, but regardless the validity of the patent, this is where the tech world is going. When everything is connected to the cloud and all communication is ultra-fast, all you need is a device that can accept user input and output, and transfer it to a base station that processes the data. All computational functions and display data will be stored and transferred wirelessly.
- atirip 14y agoI should be patenting living to 130 years old. All the 129 years old in the future would pay to my grandson through their wrinkled noses.
- nmcfarl 14y agoTo heck with that, Wikipedia says the verified oldest person is alive and 115. I say you patent living to 116, and start collecting checks next year if old Jiroemon Kimura, is that lucky / unlucky. * or you could skip verified and go with 123, but why wait?
- goldfeld 14y agoSo is he getting a patent on paper? How novel.
- res0nat0r 14y ago"The network is the computer." - John Gage of Sun Microsystems. This looks like a newer version of a thin client. See the Sun Ray from '99: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoTransferring power and data wirelessly to displays as described in the patent is currently infeasible... No, our patent system isn't broken at all. Whereas the patent system was made to ensure knowledge was transferred, now the people getting the patents don't even have to know how to build something.
- tubbo 14y agoThat's kind of an interesting idea, but I'd honestly be surprised that it wasn't taken already. ...and if I thought of this before Amazon, I would've patented it too!
- nsns 14y agoWireless terminals? Logical conclusion: If you can patent a vision, without actually inventing it, then anyone can manufacture it afterwards, provided he/she doesn't envision it in the process.
- grabeh 14y agoInteresting that claim 1 appears to have been cancelled for some reason, perhaps due to being insufficiently clear. That's generally the broadest claim so clearly the USPTO saw fit to narrow the patent down to an extent, just not as greatly as would seem appropriate, at least from the other comments on this thread. It's also a continuation and claims priority from two existing applications, although unfortunately, documents are not available for those applications, at least from the system I use which is generally fairly comprehensive[1] [1]http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=US&NR=2013069865A1&KC=A1&FT=D&ND=6&date=20130321&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDo...
- chenster 14y agoSeriously? How could he file patent for technologies don't even exist? That's like trying to patent things appeared in a sci-fi movie.
- efnx 14y agoThis seems like a repetition of the many terminals to one mainframe pattern. That said, companies like eink and pervasivedisplays already have 'epaper kiosks' that mimic this pattern with a transmitter acting as a middle man between your computer (or whatever generates the image) and the screen. [edited for clarity]
- SeanDav 14y agoCongratulations to Amazon for inventing the dumb terminal. Clearly this is an original idea. /sarcasm
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- toddmorey 14y agoDoes anyone else remember the Smart Displays that Microsoft tried to popularize around the time of the TabletPCs? They didn't have wireless power, but that certainly wasn't because no one has ever entertained the idea. They did rely on the processing power of a PC, though.
- negativity 14y agoSo, kind of like TV, minus the plugs or batteries. (...and maybe VCRs that prevent you from dubbing VHS to VHS)
- ianstallings 14y agoGood news everyone. I just patented a way to float to work on a cloud of rainbows.
- chrischen 14y ago"Transferring power and data wirelessly to displays as described in the patent is currently infeasible..." So when someone does the actual work of figuring out the hard part of this idea... they won't be able to use it because of this patent?
- gfunk911 14y agoObviously the patent is stupid. But the idea is great, I've had this repeatedly. I carry around at minimum 2 devices that are mostly redundant. It's wasteful. I'd like one "base device" (today it would probably be a higher-powered version of your phone) and several satellite devices. A big screen that my phone snaps into or talks with is #1 on my list
- Falling3 14y agoLike the PadFone?
- jpxxx 14y agoSo by "without processors or batteries" we mean "with a processor and a battery". Check.