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Patent Watch: Apple Adding "Add Media" to iPhone Phone App?

By , Thursday, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:20 am
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Apple Phone Media Sharing Patent

Apple Insider has unearthed another very cool, who-knows-if-they'll-ever-deploy-it, Apple patent pertaining to the iPhone. This one, credited to engineer Jeffrey Terlizzi pertains to media file sharing while already on a phone call:

"For example, the user may initiate a telephone call with his friend in order to ask the friend if she is familiar with a particular song," Apple said. "Once the phone call has been established between the user and his friend, the user may select the song of interest from his communications device, and he may send the song to his friend over the same communication path used by the communications device to establish the communications operation, so that the two may continue their phone conversation while the song plays simultaneously."

In addition to music, video, photos, voicemail, and podcasts are also mentioned, as are requests in the form of video conferencing (oh, hi, Mobile iChat!), and control over media playback during a call.

Forget 3.0, let the rumors for 3.1 and 4.0 begin! (Joking! A little...)

Rene Ritchie

Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.

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  1. iPhoneMilk says:

    Awesome!!!!

    Woohoo!!!

    Stevie Jobs! I love you!!

    no seriously... this would be awesome... :P

  2. guinness0514 says:

    Isn't Apple a little of a patent hog as well? I think this was issued back in 2007 so with AT&T's death grip on Apples nards I doubt we will ever see this one. That being said...sure is a cool idea...

  3. Dionte says:

    Night before last a song started playing on my phone when I picked up a call, I could hear it but the person I was talking to could not. Half way there.

  4. OmariJames says:

    When the iPhone first came out under 1.0 , when ever you played a song , the person on the phone could hear the music playing.

    The only things that you couldn't control it. At least this idea gives users control.

  5. icebike says:

    @Guinness:

    Apple has sat on this for two years. Not necessarily because of ATT, but more likely because there was only EDGE in existence when this was patented.

    So Jeffrey Terlizzi, (Not Steve Jobs, iPhoneMike) dreamed this up when all he had to work with was WIFI and Wishes.

    This could EASILY be melded into iChat or Skype or (insert two dozen other apps) running on WiFi even before there is adequate cellular bandwidth to handle it.

    Next up: How to waltz around the dozens and dozens of patents covering Video Phones.

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