The Apple slide-to-unlock patent that isn't

Posted by Nilay Patel on October 26, 2011 03:48 pm 29

So many stories today about Apple's "new" slide to unlock patent, and all the requisite hysteria about it — too bad no one read the claims or did any research. Apple's actually had a virtually identical patent on slide-to-unlock since February 2010, and it was one of the first patents asserted against HTC when Apple began that lawsuit. I broke it down back at Engadget, you might remember — I said the patent was broad enough to cover virtually every slide to unlock system I could think of.

So why the second patent? Android OEMs have innovated rapidly on the unlock screen, and there's a good chance that original patent doesn't cover things like the puzzle unlock or HTC's Sense 3.0 app-based unlock. Apple's new patent broadens the scope just a little, so it might read on those behaviors, but ultimately I look at this as the patent system doing just fine — all these Android manufacturers were forced to come up with innovative workarounds, and we're all better for it. I wouldn't freak out about this one at all.