Apple has won design patents from the US Patent & Trademark Office for the third generation iPod touch (patent D630630), the design and assembly of the iPod touch (7869206), and their earphones with a remote mic (7869608), an active enclosure for a computing device with an illuminable portion(7868905).

Inventors of the first patent are Bartley Andre, Daniel Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Evans Hankey, Richard Howarth, Jonathan Ive, Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Dean Rohrbach, Peter Russell-Clarke, Douglas Satzger, Christopher Stringer, Eugene Whang and Rico Zorkendorfer. The inventors of the second patent are Teodor Dabox, Hui Leng Lim, Kyle Yeates and Stephen Lynch. The inventors on the third patent are Wendell Sander, Jeffrey Terlizzi, Douglas Farrar, Timothy Johnson, Brian Sander, Brian Connor and Jesse Dorogusker. Duncan Kerr is the inventor of the fourth patent.

Three has also been granted three other patents. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 7869503 is for rate and quality control for H.264/AVC video coder and scene analyzer. The invention relates to the encoding of video signals, and more particularly, encoding of video allowing control of bitrate to meet a target while ensuring that good video quality will result when the encoded stream is decoded. The inventors are Barin Haskell, Adriana Dumitras, James Normile, Hsi-Jung Wu, Xiaochin Nie and Atul Puri.

Patent number 7870327 involves controlling memory operations using a driver and flash memory type tables. Systems and processes may include a first memory and a second memory. A driver and/or an application may be stored in the first memory. Flash memory type data of the first memory may be stored in the second memory. The driver may control the first memory at least partially based on the flash memory type data. The first memory may be exchanged for a third memory. The driver may be stored on the third memory. The flash memory type data for the third memory may be stored on the second memory. The inventors are Michael J. Cornwell and Christopher P. Dudte.

Patent number 7869277 is for managing data writing to memories. Per the patent, systems and processes may use a first memory, a second memory, and a memory controller. The second memory is at least as large as a block of the first memory. Data is received and stored in the second memory for further writing to the second memory. The inventors are Michael J. Cornwell and Christopher P. Dudte.

Patent number 7870562 involves a media rendering hierarchy. To process media data from one or more sources, a hierarchy of media components are formed. Each media component receives as input one or more streams of media data and manipulates the media data to produce an output media stream. The media components conform to a uniform plug-in structure. The plug-in structure defines an abstraction that facilitates the hierarchical organization of the media components and that allows the media components to interact, in a decoupled manner, with each other and with processors that perform specific types of media data manipulations. The hierarchy can be reorganized dynamically. Craig Hansen-Sturm is the inventor.

-- Dennis Sellers