Cinema-friendly Motorola mobile innovation
It is amazing what you can dig up at the Patents Office. New Scientist’s Barry Fox has been snooping around the UK office and come up with a few innovations Motorola isn’t quite yet ready to talk about.
It’s happened to most people; your cellphone rings in a meeting, theatre or concert hall, and goes on ringing until you have struggled it out of a pocket or purse, and pressed the right buttons to silence the wretched thing. But there could soon be a very simple answer. Moto reminds that any loudspeaker can also work in reverse, as a mîcrophone. So tapping a phone hard can make the speaker generate a pulse of electric power. The new phone will sense this pulse to switch off the ringer. So when the phone rings it can be silenced simply by hitting the pocket or purse.
