Apple will pay $5 million to settle a patent lawsuit with the Taiwan-based firm Elan, a report said Thursday. According to its website, Elan focuses on the research and development of integrated circuits and touchpad module solutions. Concluding an ongoing spat, the two companies have now agreed on a patent sharing relationship, according to Reuters. Elan originally filed a suit against Apple in 2009 alleging that Apple was infringing on two patents related to multitouch technology. Apple countersued in the U...

Apple recently won an injunction that could prevent HTC from importing several Android phones into the United States, and now it has been granted a patent for a technology that may drastically affect how Android vendors design their devices and user interfaces. The Cupertino-based company was granted a patent titled “Portable electronic device with graphical user interface supporting application switching,” which basically means Apple has been awarded a patent for switching apps while on a phone ...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday published 14 new patents that were recently granted to Apple. According to PatentlyApple, two of those patents are related to “high profile multitouch” technology. One describes “front-end signal compensation” on a display and a second involves a “method for forming crystalline ITO on top of a nonconductive substrate.” As PatentlyApple notes, the first patent is related to the touchscreen technology that was first introduced ...

Apple may be working on pico-projector technology that could be used with its iPhone and Mac products according to a patent filing discovered by UnwiredView. The patent, titled “Projected display shared workspaces,” shows how one might be able to use an iPhone or Mac to project content onto a larger open space, such as a wall, by attaching a small pico-projector. In addition, users could control the projection using multitouch gestures on their iPhone screen or Mac trackpad. The patent reminds us of A...

Apple on Tuesday officially announced that its iWork productivity applications, including Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, are now available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Apple has completely redesigned the applications to take advantage of iOS’s multitouch features. “Now you can use Keynote, Pages, and Numbers on iPhone and iPod touch to create amazing presentations, documents, and spreadsheets right in the palm of your hand,” Philip Shiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide pr...

Google Maps has hit a new milestone as the first Android application to surpass the 50 million download mark. The free application has seen many revisions since its public introduction in 2008 — as part of Android 1.6 — and now includes 3D modeling with multi-touch zoom and panning, free voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation, and support for Google’s Latitude and Places products. Given that it’s available on every iteration of Android — that we can think of — we’re not surprised to le...

Apple has been testing multitouch gestures for quite a while, and we reported in January that this will likely lead to Apple ultimately ditching the home button on future iPad and iPhone devices. The feature, which simplifies certain tasks such as app switching, still isn’t available to the general public. But as it turns out, anyone can enable multitouch gestures on the iPad or iPad 2 with just a few minutes and $5. As pointed out by Gizmodo, users can simply purchase Apple’s iOS developer softwa...

On the heels of today’s MacBook Pro unveiling, Apple announced that it would be making a preview of Mac OS X 10.7 — codenamed Lion — available to developers. The company writes that Lion “takes some of the best ideas from iPad and brings them back to the Mac.” Apple details several, previously disclosed, features — such as Mission Control, Launchpad, and multitouch gestures — along with a handful of new, unannounced feature additions:A new version of Mail, with an ele...

One of our Apple sources has just sent us over a couple screen shots from what we’re told is an internal test model of the iPhone 4. The shots are interesting because it looks like Apple is testing multitouch gestures on the iPhone in addition to the iPad. While this isn’t shocking, what’s interesting is that internally, the same amount of fingers applies to gestures on both devices. What we mean by this, is that you have to use four finger gestures on the iPhone just like the iPad — k...

We just got some pretty wild information from one of our Apple sources and while it’s hard to believe at first, it does make sense. We have exclusively been told that the reason Apple just added multitouch gestures for the iPad in the latest iOS 4.3 beta is because the iPad will be losing the home button. Yes, we are told that Apple, at some point in time, will remove the home button from the iPad’s design. Instead of button taps, you will use new multitouch gestures to navigate to the home screen...

Following news that iOS 4.3 beta 1 has been seeded to developers, Apple’s servers are no doubt being hammered by anxious developers looking to explore all the new features. We pinged a few of our dev friends for feedback on new additions they’ve found and here’s what we have so far:Personal hotspot capabilities for GSM devices — as we exclusively reported earlier todayAirPlay support for third-party native apps and third-party Web appsRedesigned FaceTime iconMulti-touch gesture support for...

The BendDesk is a new multitouch workspace created by the talented minds at The Media Computing Group, and it’s absolutely incredible-looking. It’s a fully curved display that looks to form a 90 degree bend and makes use of two projectors, 3 cameras, and loads of IR lights to view and track up to 10 touch points. The software they have come up with is also equally impressive — you can flick photos for instance from the top or bottom part of the display, or hold them in a locker in the middle...

If you like to be on the bleeding edge of browser releases you’ll be happy to know that Mozilla has released a third beta of its Firefox 4 browser. The update includes improvements to the JavaScript processing engine, built-in multitouch support for Windows 7, as well as a handful of bug fixes. Mozilla is due to release two more beta versions of Firefox, and a feature-freeze is scheduled for Monday, August 16th. You can grab the new version from here. Enjoy! (more…)

As with any leak, we suggest you approach this with a healthy amount of skepticism, but if a post made to PConline is to be believed, this upcoming Windows Phone 7 handset from HTC — the HD3 — is going to be an absolute beast. We mean, take a look at the purported specs:4.5″ WXGA Super AMOLED multi-touch display8 megapixel camera with dual-LED flash720p HD video recording1080p HD playbackWi-Fi / Bluetooth3G / 4G connectivity32GB microSD support1GB RAM / 1GB ROM1.5GHz Snapdragon processor1800...