Ink Phrase Termination Engine and Tablet Granted Patent

Apple's granted patent generally relates to an ink manager for acquiring and organizing pen-based ink information for use by pen-aware and other applications.

Although the current iPhone is dependent upon using your finger as the input stylus, a future larger tablet could in fact accommodate a stylus or pen-based input system as well so as to address both handwriting and drawing applications. Such a system would be able to tap into Apple's Inkwell application that is noted a as a key technology under OS X Snow Leopard.

According to Apple's Inkwell verbiage, Mac OS X Leopard comes with built-in handwriting recognition technology called Inkwell (or Ink). If you connect a graphics tablet to your Mac, you can write on the tablet using a stylus, and Inkwell translates what you write to typed words in your document. Some applications allow you to enter text directly; with others, you first enter the text into a “scratch pad” (where you can edit or revise it) before bringing it into the application. Inkwell supports several stylus gestures, making it easy to select, edit, and delete text. It also understands English, French, and German.

Apple's noted patent FIG. 3 above, is a highly schematized, functional block diagram of the software components running on a tablet. Here we see an Ink Phase Termination Engine and various handwriting components working in concert with a Tablet PC. Also noted above is Apple's patent FIG. 2 which is a top view of a tablet device.  The illustration shows us that the tablet could provide a series of horizontal lines to assist users align their handwriting. Various control buttons could provide commands for scrolling purposes or to call up apps such as email or Apple's iWork based Pages etc.

Apple's Proposed Smartbook-Tablet Hybrid