Type of Article: MacTech Blog

Apple has been granted a patent (number D671,114) for a portable display device with cover — the iPad and its Smart Cover, in other words.

The inventors are Jody Akana, Bartley K. Andre, Jeremy Batillou, Daniel J. Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Evans Hankey, Julian Hoenig, Richard P. Howarth, Jonathan P. Ive, Duncan Robert Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Dean Rorhbach, Peter Russell-Clarke, Christopher J. Stringer, Eugene Antony Whang and Rico Zorkendorfer.

Apple has also been granted the following patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office are:

The Passbook feature introduced in iOS6 hasn’t been widely acclaimed (though it’s not been lambasted the way the Maps app has). However, the future holds potential for the feature/service.

In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s how Apple describes it: “Passbook keeps things like airline boarding passes, movie tickets, and gift cards all in one place. Everything’s there — ready for scanning — right from your iPhone. You’ll find Passbook-enabled apps on the App Store. And you can get gift cards and more from participating merchants.

More great news — moneywise, at least — for Apple: price comparison shopping site, PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com) has leased the results of its third winter holiday shopping survey, revealing consumers’ expected shopping habits within the tech category this holiday season.

Would you like your iPhone or iPad to expand or shrink on-screen images depending on how close it is to you? That could eventually be possible. A new Apple patent (number 20120287163) is for mechanism for automatically scaling the size of a set of visual content based upon how close a user’s face is to a display.