Wearables are growing and over the next year or two they’ll likely become more mainstream and better products. When a market starts to grow so does the rush to the patent office and that shows with 41,301 patents for wearables filed since 2010. According to eweek.com Samsung is the leader when it comes to patents held at four percent of all patents filed. Four percent doesn’t seem like a lot but it’s biggest competitor (Apple) is in third place in patents filed. The real interesting number is inside that four percent, Samsung’s patents are more than half relevant (53%) to the users output components like displays and speakers. Basically half their patents cover what a user interacts with in a wearable, so those are valuable assets to have.
“Samsung is a major electronic device and component developer via Samsung Electronics, as well as a major display developer via Samsung Display,” Tony Sun, a Lux Research analyst and lead author of the report, told eWEEK. “Thus, moving into wearable devices, such as smart watches and virtual reality goggles, are a natural fit for its existing technology portfolio, customer base, as well as manufacturing capability. As for Apple, it is the third filer in the wearable space but ranked about 20 in the printed, flexible, and organic electronics space.”
The wearables space has a lot of room for growth and we’re sure to see even more patents (and patent wars) being filed over the next few years. Samsung has been a leader in consumer technology and along with Apple tend to be the ones everyone else follows. What do you think of Samsung’s wearable patent lead? Let us know in the comments below or on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
[button link=”http://www.eweek.com/small-business/samsung-holds-lead-for-wearables-patents.html” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: eweek[/button]Last Updated on November 27, 2018.
