Now, what is the most annoying thing about a smartphone? Certainly, there are many answers to this broad question, but my vote goes to the moment when you are lying on your side in bed using your phone and the screen orientation flips.

Thankfully, a new Apple patent unearthed by AppleInsider and subsequently reported by MacRumors suggests that Cupertino may have a solution for iPhone users. However, since the patent is clearly clever and feasible with existing hardware, one has to imagine that Apple could implement it in iOS tomorrow, well before the iPhone 12 is released, if they wanted to. [The patent discusses using Face ID to determine the relative position of the user's face and the phone. In other words, the device would know the exact orientation of the screen, even if the phone is being operated flat on a table, on its side or on top of the head.

This would be a major innovation over existing systems for determining screen orientation that rely solely on readings from the device's accelerometer. [However, as anyone who uses a smartphone knows, an accelerometer alone is not enough. Users can avoid such frustrations by locking the device's orientation to portrait mode in the Control Center, but toggling that on and off is a bit of a hassle for the brief moments when you're not holding the phone normally. [Android 9 Pie introduces a suitable solution to this problem. It's a little orientation reversal button that pops up in the corner of the display when auto-rotate is turned off but you still want to use the device in landscape mode. However, with today's easy availability of advanced facial recognition, there should be a better solution to this dilemma than a simple button.

In fact, I wonder why Apple hasn't added this feature already; every new iPhone going back to the iPhone X already has a TrueDepth camera. What's more, the device doesn't even need to collect the same detailed and advanced information that it does for facial recognition.

We expect Apple to work on this patent and include it in the next version of iOS. Normally, we recommend that readers always take the ruminations surrounding patents with a pillar of salt - but then again, this one is so simple, we can't imagine it being far off.