US 8,134,306 · Granted 2012-03-13

The BlackBerry LED Blink Patent That Signaled Your Messages

Research In Motion patented a simple but clever way to make your phone's LED light blink and change colors to tell you that a message arrived without wasting battery by keeping the screen on. You could customize how it blinked and what colors it used — your phone's own personal light show.

Curated and verified by the IsItPatented Editorial team

The plain-English version

What it protects

The claim covers a candy-bar style phone with a liquid crystal display that uses a light-emitting diode to provide visual notifications when the device is powered on but inactive. What's protected here is the combination of using customizable LED patterns — including waveform, blinking speed, color selection, and color sequencing — to alert users to events without activating the main display. The LED can either be part of the display's backlighting system or operate independently.

Why it matters

During the early smartphone era, battery life was precious, and every pixel lit cost power. RIM's BlackBerry devices were known for constant email and messaging notifications, so finding ways to alert users without turning on the power-hungry LCD screen was genuinely valuable. This patent protected RIM's approach to balancing user awareness with battery conservation, a real engineering tradeoff that defined mobile device design before always-on screens became standard.

Real-world use

When your BlackBerry sat on your desk and an email arrived, that little colored LED would pulse or blink to grab your attention before you even picked up the phone.

Original USPTO abstract

A wireless handheld communications device with a liquid crystal display, especially, a field sequential liquid crystal display, includes a visual notification for a powered up, inactive state. The visual notification is preferably through a light emitting diode that may be part of the backlighting system for the LCD or may be independent from the backlighting system. The waveforms, periodicity, color selection, and color sequencing may be customizable by one or both of the manufacturer and user.

Patent details

Publication number: US 8,134,306
Filing date: 2008-06-05
Grant date: 2012-03-13
Assignee: Research In Motion Limited
Inventor(s): DRADER MARC, ROBINSON JAMES, LOWLES ROBERT
CPC class: H04M1/22

View original record on Google Patents →

Want to file your own patent?

If you're designing the next must-have notification feature for wearables or phones, search our free scanner to see what LED and alert patterns are already locked down.

Free patentability scan