This Apple patent lists Steve Jobs as an inventor and is directed towards voicemail manager for portable multifunction device. Mr. Jobs was awarded U.S. Patent 7996792 entitled “Voicemail manager for portable multifunction device” on August 9, 2011. The utility patent has been cited 68 times by other U.S. patents in the field of telecommunications and in other fields.

A computer-implemented method for management of voicemail messages, performed at a portable electronic device with a touch screen display, includes: displaying a list of voicemail messages; detecting selection by a user of a respective voicemail message in the list; responding to the user selection of the respective voicemail message by initiating playback of the user-selected voicemail message; displaying a progress bar for the user-selected voicemail message, wherein the progress bar indicates the portion of the user-selected voicemail message that has been played; detecting movement of a finger of the user from a first position on the progress bar to a second position on the progress bar; and responding to the detection of the finger movement by restarting playback of the user-selected voicemail message at a position within the user-selected voicemail message corresponding substantially to the second position on the progress bar. Link: U.S. Patent 7996792

Apple filed this utility patent on June 28, 2007 giving it a processing time of 1503 days (compared to an average processing time of 1817 in the field). They have a total number of 15027 patents. The first named inventor is Steve P. Jobs of Palo Alto, CA. The patent was allowed by primary examiner Tuyetlien T Tran and examiner .

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