Apple awarded patents for virtual keyboard, Pages and more

According to Patently Apple, the US Patent and Trademark Office has just published 23 new patents granted to Apple, including one regarding virtual keyboards and another for Pages, part of Apple's iWork suite. Apple filed a patent application for a virtual keyboard just two months before the original iPhone's launch. It covers a method of operating a touchscreen to activate one of a number of virtual keys, allowing the device to work out which key you meant to touch even though your finger may not actually be on it.

The Pages patent deals with the process it has to go through to convert files from other programs, like Microsoft's Word, Excel or PowerPoint or PDF files, which turns out to be much more complicated than you'd think.

The other patents cover a number of products, from a world travel kit power adapter and technical details of the DisplayPort adapter to editing blocks of a web page in an email program and multimedia data transfer.