According to a new patent granted to Apple you may not have to worry about breaking the display in the iPhone of the future as it will always land on its back, like a cat landing on its feet.

The patent describes a “protective mechanism for an electronic device,” which use a combination of sensors inside the smartphone as well as the vibration motor to make adjustments to the free-falling unit before it hits the ground to avoid damage to sensitive parts like the display and the camera.

The patent calls for an array of sensors that are commonplace in all of Apple’s current smartphones and tablets like accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS units, which would be used in conjunction with an ultrasonic emitter to estimate the phone’s trajectory, spin and angle of descent in real-time. The vibration motor could then be used to change the orientation of the phone by spinning at a speed and pattern determined by calculations done on the phone’s CPU.

Although the patent was granted to Apple, the Cupertino company has already changed the type of vibration motors it uses in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus when compared to previous iPhones which would no longer be able to change the orientation of the phone in flight.

While the patent is legitimate, its initial reporting in 2013 led to a hoax that circulated with the release of iOS 7 telling people that the AirDrop file transfer feature in the operating system would perform the aforementioned task of righting a phone on its way to the floor.

Sadly for those that believed the hoax the actual feature may now just be a few years away from being real.

[Source – Apple Insider, Via – TechCrunch]