Nokia Dodges Apple’s ‘Slide To Unlock’ Patent

Apple has been merrily suing various companies over their “slide to unlock” patent for smartphones. It won against Motorola over this patent and it’s currently attacking Samsung over it. Nokia, quite understandably, doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of such a lawsuit, so has come up with a version of “slide to unlock” which is all their own. It works like this, as Unwired View explains, “In Nokia’s view, you slide an icon across the screen to reveal at least one app icon, while the icon which you have slid across the screen expands and is eventually overlaid onto the app icon. Sliding further to an ‘unlock region’ of the device will result in the screen getting unlocked and the desired app being launched.”

The standard, unmodified Android operating system doesn’t have this functionality in it, but if it eventually gets added, one wonders if Nokia will use their patent to suppress the feature? The overall impression is that this is just a defensive move though, so it looks like Android is safe from Nokia. Other companies such as Google are also filing their own versions of this patent.