| 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. |