Apple granted patent for touch-sensitive bezel

I have 2 MBPs, so I like Apple products. Palm already has a touch control enabled bezel on the Palm Pixi and it works surprisingly well.

OOPS sorry about that guys, wasn't paying attention of what I was copying and pasting! LOL What I meant to say is this:

Ok so why does everyone keep saying this is for the next gen iPad? Is there some evidence yet that this couldn’t be for the current version of the iPad and Apple waited to announce it until the patent was granted? I mean this would after all be a smart strategy… announce just the bare minimum of iPad features at the event, enough to wet the appetites of the fans as well as the content publishers and developers all the while keeping their competitors at bay by leaving them to think that the device has less features than it really does… Then once the launch of the device OR the launch of the new iPhone OS comes into play it’s they tout all these amazing features that no one knew where there and catch all their competitors with their pants down…. I truly believe this is what’s going on… Steve Jobs said himself (allegedly) that this is the most important thing he has ever done… I don’t think he’s referring to an oversized iPod I’d think he’d be referring to a lot of the things that he purposely didn’t show at the event. Microsoft and Google are playing checkers here and Apple is playing chess. IMHO

Team,

We are steadily making progress with having Remedy tickets filled out correctly on a more consistent basis. One thing we do need to work on in the tickets is making sure the platform is filled out correctly. The platform is something that wasn’t there when we had the initial meetings about the new Remedy. During those meetings most of you requested to have this information added in to the ticket. Now that this has been added, we need to make sure it is being filled out consistently and correctly. Any tickets that are currently in your queue please check and make sure the correct platform is updated. Please have all your tickets updated with the proper platform by COB today. If you have any questions about this, please let me know.

Sounds a lot like what the palm pre has with touch sensitive area beneath the screen that lets you gesture up to do something different than a swipe up on the screen would.

Why the hell does Apple get a patent for everything? I love Apple to the core, but seriously hate this. Obtaining patents for every possible thing you may implement at some point really impacts the rest of the products on the market that may want to use the technology but do not want to infringe on a patent.

For example, Dell already does this in their Latitude Z laptop. They have a touch-sensitive screen bezel.

Do we know for sure that the iPad bezel currently has no touch functionality? It seems to me that it could be in there just waiting for an OS update to turn it on. That would be a very cool launch-day enhancement, IMO.

Umm, perhaps they can now sue Kodak back for infringing on their patents...

http://store.kodak.com/store/ekconsus/en_US/pd/S730_Digital_Frame/baseProductID.152830600/productID.152830700

... oh, wait, they have been making these for years.

Who says the hardware isn't already there for touch in the bezel?