Apple wins patent for its rotary dialing interface

By Matthew Chung on 12/29/2010, filed in Home > Apple

You might remember the fake iPod rotary phone design that Steve Jobs joked about during his 2007 keynote. Well, it turns out the folks over at Apple have a sense of humor too as the fruity company has been granted a patent for such a design. In case you missed it, the design allows for devices such as the iPod classic to use its click wheel to control a rotary phone dial, similar to those old-fashioned phones that we used to use back in the day. It’s hard to imagine an iPhone/iPod using this design, but then again, who knows what the future holds?

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Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iPhone: iPhone: The iPhone is Apple's line of smartphones. That was also the original name of the first iPhone, which was announced on January 9th 2007 by Steve Jobs during the Macworld Keynote. The iPhone was released to the public in June of the same year. The development of the iPhone started in 2004, was internally called "project purple" and was the fruit of a collaboration between Apple and AT&T. Since then, Apple has released new iPhone models every year, with the iPhone 3G in July 2008, the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone 4S in October 2011 and the iPhone 5 in September 2012. The iPhone represented more than half of Apple's revenues in 2012.

Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was the co-founder of Apple Inc, which he created with Steve Wozniak on April 1 1976. The pair introduced personal computing with the Apple IIe. Steve jobs has also created Pixar, which he sold to Disney in 2006 and Next, a computer company that eventually merged back with Apple. Today's OS X is largely based on the work done at Next. After leaving Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs came back in 1996 in an advisory role and became permanent CEO again in 2000. Under his watch, Apple will execute projects like the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

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