There is nothing quite like the sinking feeling you get when you hear a crack after dropping your phone or tablet, but reports suggest Apple is working on a new technology to prevent phones from landing on their screens when they fall.
The company has registered a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office to create a new iPhone protection system. The new mechanism would let the phone sense when it is in free-fall, and also detect the phone's proximity to the ground and rotate it in mid-air to avoid landing on the screen - kind of like what a cat does to land on its feet.
US electronics insurers SquareTrade test the durability of the iPhone 6
The tech-giant applied for the patent in 2011 and it is unclear how actively the company is pursuing the idea - or if it would be possible to develop such a feature.
Here's the science bit: the patent says that Apple hopes to use some of the phone's already existing components to create the new technology. The iPhone has an "accelerometer, gyroscopic sensor, distance or position sensors (e.g., radar, ultrasonic, and the like), location sensors (e.g., global position system, compass), image sensors (e.g., camera), sound or audio sensors (e.g., speakers, microphones) which may be used as a sonar combination” to detect when and how the phone is falling.
This is what the process would look like, according to the patent:
