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Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Come on, I clearly meant before Apple first used it. Today, 100 out of 100 engineers would consider it.

You are right that obviousness changes over time, and it's important to consider it from the perspective of the time of the invention.

But some things genuinely were obvious at the time of their 'invention'.

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I actually wish it was that obvious: I used Palm OS, RIM, and Windows Mobile devices before the iPhone and the unlock mechanisms (on the touchscreens!) ranged from "press the tiny * key, then the unlock soft button" (which was awful) to "press the center button once" (somewhat less awful). Slide to unlock was a huge deal for me: I no longer dreaded the crazy key commands needed to unlock a smartphone.

Palm Treo: http://blog.treonauts.com/picKeyGuard01.jpg

Palm Windows Mobile: http://www.hpc.ru/lib/arts/2364/palm-treo-750v-keylock.gif

Windows Mobile: http://cdn.pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DeviceLo...

The obvious question is why didn't it appear on ANY of the major OEM's phones before the iPhone ?

Because the previous touchscreens was resistive and used with a pen/nail. And their UIs wasn't at all about dragging stuff but rather clicking on them.

Once you define your UI around a capacitive touchscreen "slide to unlock" becomes trivial.

Which is really the key aspect to all of this.

Technology moves forward enabling new behaviors that were never possible before, and much of the "innovation" that people declare is nothing more than a land-rush (see the "on a computer" that was the invention of countless patents). The iPhone stood on the backs of the GPS industry, for instance, that pushed much of the innovations in mobile chips, GPUs (OpenGL ES and mobile GPUs were made for the in-car GPS industry), screen and touchscreen technology. Suddenly the technology was there to do things that couldn't be done before and the land grab was afoot. Is a land grab innovation?

I don't discount that Apple invented and refined a lot, or that some companies seem to be addicted to simply cloning (Samsung is particularly guilty of this), but a lot of what Apple is credited with isn't much more evolved than "on a computer". And now that we have all sorts of innovations in battery technology, chipsets, etc, things like Google's glasses are possible, but only a fool would imagine that they created them out of the ether, instead of simply moved to where technology had brought them.

But there are numerous examples of "swipe to unlock" right here in this thread. By qualifying that with "major OEMs", you're just moving the goal post.

I'm not trying to move any goal post. We are dealing with the major OEMs who are alleged to be infringing. And numerous examples of prior art where ?

All I've seen in this thread is the Neonode. The video games and hardware locks are ridiculous because a patent is NOT a general idea it is a specific implementation of a concept.

"All I've seen in this thread is the Neonode."

It only takes one, and there is no requirement that that one be from a shipped product from a "major OEM". A sufficiently descriptive Usenet post is sufficient. Patents have been rejected because the described object was previously described in science fiction novels.

That is a fair question -- the neonode phone may count as prior art (although it looks a bit different to Apple's patent claims), but it's not exactly a well known phone. It's very unlikely that people at Apple would have been aware enough of that to make their own implementation 'obvious' based solely on that -- unless it was big in the US but never made it far here? Edit: and two independent implementations (out of the hundreds of phone models) certainly doesn't prove obviousness; that's a nasty insult to the engineers/designers who worked on the neonode and may well have been proud of their innovation.

Still, for all that I love Apple and their products, swipe to unlock is a pitifully small thing to waste a patent on. To my mind, patents are needed but should be:

* non-transferable to a new owner -- no buying and selling, and lost altogether when the owning company is itself acquired.

* only applicable to actual products -- invalid if none of the company's products use it within, say, one or two years of application.

* short term -- two or three years from initial product release ought to be enough, while still allowing some competition down the line.

* very low base cost, but with a small cost per product model and maybe even a tiny cost for each device sold.

Those four changes could probably bring the patent system back to its original intent, in my opinion.

Prior art doesn't mean it was obvious, but it does mean the patent was invalid. It doesn't matter, for patents, whether you knew about the previous creation of the thing in question, your creation of it still can't be patented (and if the previous one was, you are still infringing - although you may not be "knowingly infringing", which can affect the penalties but not whether you infringe in the first place).

Yes, but if i recall correctly, apple's patent claim is quite specific about dragging an on-screen picture across a visually represented path -- isn't that how google got around it in android? The neonode, on the other hand, doesn't look to have any visual indicator at all; it just uses a corner-to-corner swipe with nothing extra on the screen.

Also, it was the judge who said the neonode made it obvious, which seems wrong to me given the lack of mainstream implementations.

But none of this changes the fact that this patent is ludicrously trivial -- even if not obvious -- and should never have seen the light of day.

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