iPhone 7 could dry itself

admin November 27, 2015 SmartPhones Leave a comment 887 Views

iPhone 7 could ‘dry itself by shooting water out of its speakers’
One of the most-read articles on Macworld is a tutorial discussing ways of drying out an iPhone that’s got wet: it’s a distressing, and distressingly common, thing to happen to a device that costs several hundred pounds and contains important, sensitive and possibly unrecoverable data.

For this reason readers and pundits frequently speculate on the possibility that future iPhones will be waterproof. Indeed, the most recent generation of iPhone models are the most waterproof yet; but we still wouldn’t be pleased if the iPhone 6s fell in a paddling pool.

A patent published on 12 November suggests a radical new solution to the water logging issue: a mechanism whereby the iPhone can dry itself by pumping water – or other liquid – out through its speaker grills.

iPhone 7 release date rumour: Water expelling patent
Patent application 20150326959, wonderfully, is called LIQUID EXPULSION FROM AN ORIFICE.

“The embodiments described herein are directed to an acoustic module that is configured to remove all or a portion of a liquid that has accumulated within a cavity of the acoustic modules,” the patent’s summary reads.

The concept is centred around modules within the speaker cavities that can be made more or less hydrophobic, depending on the charge applied to them: when liquid is detected, charges would be applied across the various modules in such a way that the liquid would be moved across the modules and ultimately expelled from the cavity.

We love the idea almost as much as the name of the patent, but as with most of the more interesting patents we hear about, it’s unlikely to bear fruit in a real shipped product for a little while.