Microsoft has recently filed a patent that would elicit two specific responses from mobile phone users. First is “why didn’t they think of this earlier?” The second is, “what possessed them to call it whacking?”

The patent Microsoft filed basically involves a new way of triggering a phone to go on silent or stop making a sound by “whacking” the device. You have to acknowledge that the process of whacking a phone to keep it quiet is, well, genius. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious, so basic that you wonder why no one implemented this feature before. [Read more…]