If you put all the circuitry and battery behind the display, then opened the laptop, wouldn't it fall over? Unless the transparent keyboard section is heavier than the rest of the thing, that is, but after all the effort to make the rest of it light, using lead-crystal for the keyboard section sounds like a high price to pay for cool. At the other extreme, a little stand-up leg to come out of the back of the display half would be too un-cool to be balanced by the transparent keyboard.

Presumably this will still be based on the American market model and therefore have no decent 3g, camera or smartphone functionality but will look great, and as such will have mac fanboyz using tissues at a rate of knots.

That second image looks more like a laptop with a block of glass where the trackpad is, allowing you to see through to a portion of the main screen when the laptop is shut. still a daft idea though.

Either you printed the sketches to a completely different patent or you can't read a drawing, because those drawings definitely don't show what you describe. Only the touchpad section on the laptop is shown as see-through and the see-through part doesn't seem to incorporate a display (although it technically could), rather you can see a small section of the main display through the touchpad. The keyboard could be a standard design and house all the electronics. As for the phone patent, what electronics/wiring need to be hidden in the lower section? It has a frame around it, and other than the display/touchpad/mic connections, all of which could easily be hidden in the frame, the rest could be in the upper part of the phone. So both are very feasible designs even with todays technology.

Ian.

thats not hard to do at all ! how do they hide the connections in an LCD ? hmmm ? could it possibly be using transparent vapor-deposited electrodes ? well yes .. it could.

All apple would have to do is use the same technology used in LCD to make the touch sensors. simple COG technology could then hev the controller close to the hinge. Since these sensors are capacitive based they would work from both sides of the glass... simple but brilliant !

for people that want to find out the technical details on how such touchesensors work : go to silabs website www.silabs.com

they have source code , schematics and detialeded explanation on how to roll your own.

Am I the only one who finds the idea of being able to "own" a concept somewhat irksome?

I don't mind people owning the design of a device, but if you can't build one yet, then surely by patenting it should it ever be produced you are stunting the growth of the sector.

I would also have thought that given a clam shell design has been around for years and a design where the keypad is a touch screen has been about for a while, the meeting of these two styles would be frickin' obvious.

I am starting to dislike news stories about patents - all they ever seem to do is annoy me...

I read the word, but fail to get the message:

Patents are for technical features, whereas here we are presented with some design ideas.

Time to blow up the USPTO, after hours, of course.

The main problem I find with virtual touchscreen keyboards is the inability to register more than one touch point at one given time (trust me, my TyTN goes absolutely nuts when I try to touch two points of the screen at the same time, and so does my iPaq and Clie before). I can see that as a problem to touch typists like me.

Oh, no, it's true Nintendo in cahoots with Apple. The DS phone ;).