Technology Challenge - Apps
A remarkable property of smartphones has been the software development environment they come with. Every major type of smartphone comes with an advanced software development environment and market for third party software called "apps." This rich software environment has unleashed armies of third-party software developers for all of the major types of smartphones.
Smartphone manufacturers face a challenge whenever they consider adding a hardware feature that requires software to take advantage of the new feature. The challenge is how to make the feature visible to software in such a way that apps that should be using the new feature do not have to be rewritten in order to use the new feature.
For many new smartphone hardware features, this has not been a difficult problem, but for the second optional display, it is much more difficult. It is dealing with this challenge that is at the heart of the Village Green Technologies patent for the second optional display.
We can imagine many different apps for a smartphone that would explicitly use both displays for a single app. The problem is that third-party software developers will not write such apps unless there is a substantial installed base of smartphones that have the corresponding hardware. The smartphone manufacturer is therefore limited in the hardware advances that can be made to a smartphone to those advances that can be well utilized without assistance from third-party apps. Once the new hardware feature is successful in the market place, finally third-party software developers will begin to modify their apps to utilize the new feature.
Fortunately, the key value of the second optional display is not for use by a single app, but rather to allow any app to run on either screen, and to provide a GUI software environment that will gracefully handle the complexity of whether the second optional display is deployed or not, and gracefully reorganize the GUI from one with a single display to one with two separate displays.
The Village Green Technologies patent describes how to modify smartphone software systems that have been used since the development of the BlackBerry software development environment so they will support the second optional display in such a way that any app written for the system will immediately run on either display. The system may provide new GUI primitives to explicitly switch from display to display, but if none of these new primitives are used, the app will run on whichever display it was launched from.
Hardware Challenge
The obvious challenge to a second optional display is the need for robust and reliable hardware that will support deploying and stowing the second optional display. Companies that are in the business of bringing new hardware features for smartphones to market have the technological expertise to compete with each other on new inventions to do this even better than anyone can imagine today. These new inventions will be able to be patented by the companies that invent them. Some of these companies do not write the software that needs to be modified in the manner described above to allow apps for single-screen smartphones to run on either screen of a smartphone with a second optional display. This has been an additional barrier to bringing the second optional display to market.
Today, it is appropriate for software platforms for smartphones and their apps to announce support for the second optional display, and solve this challenge for companies that are capable of inventing and bringing to market the robust and reliable mechanisms for deploying and stowing the second optional display.