[icebraining]

>Many great ideas are obvious in hindsight. If it was so obvious why had nobody done it?

Because it didn't make any sense considering the technical constraints and the physical design. Smartphones before the iPhone had much smaller screens, usually resistive (requiring a stylus to operate properly) and had keyboards, which were much more practical for unlocking. Just look at the best smartphones of 2007: http://reviews.cnet.com/4321-6452_7-6600061.html

>Would you say, "Oh Amazon? Whatever they're not doing anything new. They're just selling shit except their store is on the web. Big deal, that's not innovative just because they're doing it on a computer."

Basically, yes. Other people had the same idea, and there were other ecommerce websites launched before or at the same time. It was a matter of understanding sales - particularly mail order - and the Web, which wasn't exactly common.

Was it innovative? Yeah. Was it innovative enough to get a 20 years monopoly over it? No. Is Apple's slide to unlock innovative enough for that? Hell no.

[sjs]

> Because it didn't make any sense considering the technical constraints and the physical design. Smartphones before the iPhone had much smaller screens, usually resistive (requiring a stylus to operate properly) and had keyboards, which were much more practical for unlocking.

Except as I pointed out that sort of thing just doesn't work for a lot of people. "Press this strange combination of keys in the right order and it unlocks" is not a usable solution for the masses. This was the status quo for at least 10 years, I remember the Menu * thing from 1998 and my last Nokia phone in 2008 had it.

Doing something in a different way than the way everyone else had done it for over 10 years prior is innovation. I'm not saying it warrants a patent and I never did say that. You say it's not innovative but it clearly is. As you pointed out the slide to unlock feature is trivial compared to the bigger change of using touch as the main input mechanism.

This is what innovation looks like, the iPhone changed the status quo: http://www.marco.org/2010/08/19/a-smartphone-retrospective

[icebraining]

You're confusing things. Having a big, capacitive touch screen was in fact an innovation. But having that, Slide to Unlock is obvious.

Except as I pointed out that sort of thing just doesn't work for a lot of people. "Press this strange combination of keys in the right order and it unlocks" is not a usable solution for the masses. This was the status quo for at least 10 years, I remember the Menu * thing from 1998 and my last Nokia phone in 2008 had it.

But they did that because they were limited by the keyboard, and Apple did not innovate on "ways to unlock the screen using a keyboard". They innovated on a different part of the phone, which allowed them to take a different approach on phone unlocking.

Doing something in a different way than the way everyone else had done it for over 10 years prior is innovation.

Unless it's obvious, which taking as the starting point the actual innovation - the big capacitive screen - it was.

As you pointed out the slide to unlock feature is trivial compared to the bigger change of using touch as the main input mechanism.

Well, exactly. But the patent, which is what's being discussed, is only about slide to unlock, nothing else.