How many times has your toddler thrown your new smartphone on the ground or your smartphone has tumbled down a flight of stairs as it magically leaped out of your pocket? Smartphone owners all over the world spend millions of dollars a year repairing their damaged devices due to accidental falls.
What if your phone had its own emergency crash proof airbag that was released on those many trips and tumbles your smartphones takes on everything from your floor to the pavement? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has patented a system for protecting devices from impact damage using airbags, springs and even a jet propulsion system to keep your smartphones and other portable devices safe.
The idea is borrowed from traditional airbags used in cars. The phone system hopes to use the similar technique to prevent damage to the phones upon inevitable impact.
The system uses a phone’s motion sensing technology already built into most smartphones to detect the fall and release mini airbags to reduce the potential damage or even change the trajectory of its fall by firing air jets.
But currently there is no clarity on what will happen after the airbags are deployed. Airbags are rendered useless once they are deployed until repacked by professionals. Repacking a phone’s airbag could be even more complicated and expensive.
If Amazon can bring an affordable product to the market, future smartphone owners may never know the pain of helplessly watching their phones shatter into pieces. Is the idea genius or too far-fetched for smartphone owners? Honda recently poked fun at the concept of an airbag in smartphones in a recent Japanese commercial for the mini vehicle N-WGN:
