Digital Home Thoughts: Apple Applies For Patent On Drop-proof iPod?

"Apple Computer is eyeing a technology that could make the iPod more likely to survive a fall. The company has applied for a patent on technology that would allow a portable media player to detect when it is falling and then stop reading or writing to the hard drive. Such technology would work by detecting the acceleration that accompanies a drop. "The portable-computing device protects its disk drive by monitoring for such accelerations and operating to avoid usage of the disk drive during periods of acceleration," Apple said in the patent application, which was published Dec. 16. "Through such protection, the likelihood of damage to the disk drive or loss of data stored on the disk drive is able to be substantially reduced."

This technology could certainly help prevent a great many unnecessary iPod deaths. But how reliably will it all work? There has to be some sort of latency between the point of falling and the moment the failsafe kicks in to stop read/write from occurring. And short sudden drops would probably not work in this case, or al least it would have to work pretty darn fast to save it. We'll see I guess.