Appeal No. 2003-1841 Page 2
Application No. 09/272,956
the SLKs. According to the appellants, in a conventional switching system, a switch
updates the labels based on functional modes associated with an operating context of
the wireless terminal or in response to commands entered by a user of the wireless
terminal. (Spec. at 1.)
The appellants explain that the conventional update strategy can produce
problems. If the switch provides updates on a "per-key-depression basis," it expends a
great part of its processing capacity simply updating the labels of the SLKs, which
delays the updating. (Id.) The delays, in turn, can lead to an "interpretive race
condition." (Id. at 2.) For example, when the user depresses multiple SLKs, the switch
sends a collection of updates to the wireless terminal, and the first update is processed
and displayed. If the user then depresses another SLK, the switch cannot know if all
the prior updates have been processed by the terminal and must impose interpretive
assumptions about the labels being displayed then. Furthermore, add the appellants,
the conventional update strategy of transmitting updates to the wireless terminal
requires much bandwidth. (Id.)
In contrast, the appellants' invention uses a user interface state machine to
control the SLKs and their associated labels of a wireless terminal. More specifically, a
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