US Patent Issued to Apple on July 1 for "Portable electronic device with conversation management for incoming instant messages" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,348,663, issued on July 1, was assigned to Apple Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.).

"Portable electronic device with conversation management for incoming instant messages" was invented by Gregory N. Christie (San Jose, Calif.), Marcel Van Os (Santa Cruz, Calif.), Stephen O. Lemay (Palo Alto, Calif.) and Evan Russell Doll (Palo Alto, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A portable electronic device with a touch screen display displays an incoming message from a party to a user of the device while the device is locked. The device responds to detecting a user request to view the incoming message by immediately displaying a set of messages between th...