Creative Patents Found For “Drag and Drop” on Touchscreen Devices, Revealing Tabbed Web Browsing

Remember when Creative took Apple’s lunch when they stole the ZEN UI? It seems like another Creative patent may come into play down the line to buffer the bottom line. This time, it’s for a drag and drop user interface for touchscreen devices. It was filed back in January 2008 under the 3DLabs brand, but it nontheless shows that the company has been working on the touchscreen for almost eighteen months. This is a patent application, and thus is not an official patent until the USPTO approves the application.

It seems that the way that the device will work is having an “action” area of the screen where the object (music title, album, video) is dragged onto the action tab with the finger. The copy/paste method also seems to be implemented this way- and the ability to copy/paste media files is a first for a Creative device.

One of the cool features that is enabled is tabbed web browsing, something not supported in many mobile browsers at this point, and something that would be easily done with the power of the ZMS-05 processor. While it’s not listed in the details as multi-tabbed browsing, only saying that the image “shows the user interface having draggable web items and action tabs”, the image clearly shows tabbed web browsing.

The official brief reads as follows:

A system and methods for a novel user interface of a touch sensitive screen for pocket device. The user interface contains display items and action tabs. Display items are configured to be draggable if being dragged at substantially horizontal direction; display items are configured to be scrollable if being dragged at substantially vertical direction. Dragging and releasing a draggable item to an action tab causes a specified action or a sequence of actions being applied to the item.

Below are some images that help better describe the exacts of the patent

Here’s an image for copy/paste- I assume that there will be a spiffy logo rather than the word “clipboard” and a box. However, none of this art is real, it’s purely for demonstrative reasons. Thus, it cannot be concluded that the device is landscape.

Here’s the bit for the web. First off, total suckups to the PTO. Secondly, it seems here that the tabs representing pages means tabbed browsing like Firefox, but the text has differently. It’s much cooler to assume that they are multiple tabs. I believe that the power of the ZMS-05 would allow for multitasking, as in running Pandora in one page while browsing in the other, but that’s more of an operating system feature than a patent application disclosure.

While this stuff is certainly cool and leads me to believe we will see all these cool features on the Zii EGG, none of this has been confirmed on the Zii. It is, however, a odds-on favorite to show up, as the division currently producing the Zii (3DLABS is now known as ZiiLABS) was the name on the patent application rather than Creative Technology. What do you think?

Patent Application on the USPTO

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