Interest is reporting that Apple is working on a new patent that might turn your iPhone into a point of sale system which will allow you to accept payments just by scanning bar codes. Apple aims at making iPhone more than just a phone and anything to do with money is good for Apple because it gets a cut from it. A patent was spotted at the Federal patent office which cleared all doubts.
“After the scanning operation, the handheld communication device could identify the code type associated with the barcodes from the received data. For example, in the purchase of a mobile telephone (one type of handheld communication device), a product package often includes a UPC code, IMEI code, ICC ID code and a serial number, each encoded into a barcode. The barcode scanner could scan and decode each of these barcodes and the handheld communication device could identify each code. In some embodiments, this identification is done by a pattern matching technique. In some embodiments, this identification could match each code to a recognized code according to the number of alphanumerical characters expected in the recognized code.”
Apple’s focus seems to be moving towards making the iPhone beyond what it was designed for. It already has achieved that but seems like it has not.