Custom iPhone Home Screens Based on Your Location?

The iPhone could provide a home screen customized to your current location, according to a recent patent filing unearthed by AppleInsider.

Revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office this week, Apple's filing dated Feb. 21, 2008 for "Transitional Data Sets" describes an invention that would display specific applications automatically populated based on dynamic factors like location.

"The user can create a set of location-aware applications that can be populated by transitional data sets," the filing reads. "A transitional data set is a data set that can change based on the current location of the mobile device... as determined by a positioning technology (e.g., GPS, cell tower triangulation, Wi-Fi)."


"If the user's home is in New York, then the user may configure a "weather" widget to display the weather in New York as a default," the filing reads, "and such default information can be persistent. If the user travels to San Francisco, the user can touch the "Here" button... and the "weather" widget will automatically display the weather for San Francisco... Thus each time the user travels to San Francisco, the location-aware mobile device... can automatically populate the "weather widget with transitional data associated with San Francisco."

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