FIELD OF THE INVENTION

At least one embodiment of the present invention pertains to mobile electronic devices for communication, entertainment and/or organization such as advanced mobile phones and other similar devices, and more particularly, to a mobile device with customizable functionality and form factor.

BACKGROUND

Consumer electronic devices such as mobile electronic devices have undergone significant technological advances in recent years. Availability of advanced silicon technology, processing power, memory and advanced input/output (I/O) and display systems as well as an increasing level of communication bandwidth, including next generation wireless cellular as well as WiFi/WiMax wireless broadband technologies. enable the building of more-sophisticated devices.

Currently the majority of device innovations concentrate around increasing the computing capability of wireless handsets. In some cases, wireless handsets of today are more powerful than supercomputers of decades ago. More memory, processing power and bandwidth are available today, and the end consumer is able to generate and receive orders of magnitude more information compared to just a few short years ago. However, innovations in the areas of customization, organization and advanced services remain behind the computational power increases. In fact, since the first major PDAs were introduced nearly 20 years ago, there has been little done to solve the organizational needs of consumers besides having access to an electronic version of a paper calendar. Despite the many available electric devices, the majority of the population is still relying on paper calendars due to their ease of use, reliability and lower cost and the few additional benefits offered by their electronic counterparts.

The architecture of advanced mobile devices in the prior art is a highly integrated solution which does not allow for modularization and detachability of components. The goal of most advanced mobile phone designs is to maximize the computing power of the device to support as many features as possible and allow for future programmability and application development. This dictates a very high level of integration. At the core of this architecture is a high-powered integrated processor that controls all processes within the mobile device. The integrated processor incorporates multiple micro-processing cores and digital signal processors enabling the device to run as a general purpose machine. The architecture generally utilizes a hybrid approach to control the various components and programs running on the device. Overall it employs a PC-like environment with a general purpose operating system (OS) which is capable of running any number of programs which comply with its OS standards.

On the other hand, it needs to incorporate mechanisms for support of real time applications such as phones. Building a general-purpose engine to accommodate future programming and application capabilities as well as making the device broadly applicable to a large number of usage scenarios by various device manufacturers inherently requires a significant amount of overhead, significant wasted memory and computing resources, both passively as well as during runtime, to accommodate mostly unused features. It also significantly increases the effective number of clock cycles per useful operation, the clock frequency required to run the device in order to obtain a reasonable response time for critical application steps, resulting in significant power consumption and cost.

To accommodate the general-purpose characteristic of the architecture, a significant number of compromises are made, and as a result, the performance of frequently used features can suffer due to interruptions and accommodations made for such general-purpose items. In some cases, this has led to phones that take a long time to boot up, thus jeopardizing the main features of the device. In some cases, they drain the device battery to an unacceptable level, disabling critical functions such as emergency calling as well as increase the turn-on time and device response time to a point of noticeable difference and delay in human interaction, especially upon starting up the device, eliminating the highly desired instant-on feature of the device.

FIG. 1shows the block diagram of an example of the current architecture. The integrated processor includes a number of sub-processors, such as general purpose programmable computing cores and digital signal processors, memory blocks, and drivers for a large number of peripheral devices which may be attached to the device. Advanced mobile devices are designed to provide maximum integration and provide maximum programmability. The functionality needed by the majority of mobile consumers, however, does not include an arbitrarily large number of features and applications.

SUMMARY

One aspect of the technique introduced here is a mobile device that includes a core engine to control operation of the mobile device, and a plurality of modules coupled to the core engine, where each module is dedicated to perform a different one of a plurality of functionality classes of the mobile device, and each of the plurality of modules contains its own processing element and memory. The mobile device has user-customizable functionality according to a user's needs and/or desires. The mobile device may be in the form of a multi-function mobile electronic system with distributed memory and processing elements. Such system can include functionally distinct and independently operable intelligent sub-systems (e.g., modules) which together form a multi-functional mobile electronic system while sharing information with and/or through a master subsystem (e.g., a core engine). The sub-systems can also share a data exchange block. The sub-systems can further share tag information with and/or through the master subsystem. The system is easily extendable to add additional functionality by adding additional functionally distinct and independently operable sub-systems.

Another aspect of the technique introduced here is a mobile device with a user-customizable physical form factor. The mobile device may be in the form of multi-function mobile electronic system with distributed memory and processing elements, with the ability to attach and detach from the main system chassis (housing) at the manufacturing stage, assembly stage, post-packaging, or post-sale stage. The functionally distinct and independently operable intelligent sub-systems together form a multi-functional mobile electronic system while sharing tag information with and/or through the master subsystem via shared connectors, with applicable control signals to enable such sharing.

Another aspect of the technique introduced here is a mobile device with one or more detachable intelligent displays for communication to, and/or as access to, mobile device and/or other devices. Further, a mobile device can be shared through use of such intelligent detachable displays. Independently operational small module displays can be combined to form a large display for the mobile device. The mobile device may include, or have associated with it, a plurality of independently operable display devices, which are combinable to form a single larger display device for the mobile device.

Another aspect of the technique introduced here is a time-based information system (TIBIS) with event-based storage, access and retrieval functionality, which can be used in a mobile device such as described above and/or other type of processing system. The TIBIS can include information storage and organization (i.e., a file system) that is based on time instead of file locations in a directory. Further, it can include temporary storage and organization of event, information tags, or content in user-specified or machine-defined time intervals in a short-term memory (STM). It further can include long-term or permanent storage and organization of events, information tags, or content in user-specified or machine-defined time intervals in a long-term memory (LTM). Such long-term or permanent storage and organization of event, information tags, or content may be implemented with no ability to rewrite the memory. The STM may be implemented as local non-volatile memory of the mobile device. The LTM may also be implemented as non-volatile memory, which may be local memory of the mobile device, which may be removable, or it may be remote memory on a network.

The TIBIS can include a method for capture, storage and retrieval of information in an information storage device such as a mobile electronic system based on a multi-category tagging mechanism covering temporal, geographical/location, context as well as user-defined concepts. This can involve generation, storage, distribution of multi-modal tagging of events in an electronic apparatus such as a mobile information device. It can also include a method for fast hardware-based search and retrieval of information based on the multi-modal tag system. The TIBIS provides information archiving based on time-based organization without disk fragmentation, the need for multiple backup, or the possibility of tampering with data.

