Apple awarded patents for Slide to Unlock, keyboard letter pop

I have slide to unlock on my old HTC Touch that I us as an alarm and it unlocks faster than the one on my iPod Touch.

As a feature I love it.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

My patent filing: A voting system that uses user initiated clicks or touch events on a minus/plus or up/down icon to sends data to a remote server which is used in calculating a new score.

Apple is a retardonkulous offender of the Open Web, creates walled gardens as far as the eye can see, and yes these patents are way too general.

PS - Slide to unlock type UI has been around since the early days of JavaScript library sexiness, there was one based on Prototype and Scriptaculous that was a drag slider element that performed an action - stop saying it was new clueless consumers!

BTW - I just patented up/down comment voting above, so if you down vote me I will sue you. lol.

I can't believe anyone would give a patent for Slide to Unlock. Like I said somewhere else... that's like Coke patenting "Twist to Open" on their bottles.
or how about "Click Here" what if that had a patent? Instructions shouldn't be patentable.

Jailbreak.com better watch out now!

Compass was not first introduced by Apple.

G1 and G2 have it before iPhone 3GS :)

Really happy that Apple gets the patents. Now those imitators will at least use some of their brains to innovate something instead of simply cloning.

Good for for Apple, regardless to how you feel about them as a company, the product (iPhone) did start a revolution and without thinking too long I found other great innovations that later on became standard in all other mobile OS:

- Finger gestures to scroll down/up lists
- Automatic rotation from portrait to landscape
- Pinch to zoom
- A proximity sensor to deactivates the display when talking…
- Use of capacitive screens in mobility (no stylus!? no way! )
- Compass
- AppStore

Want more? there you go:
http://mobilespoon.blogspot.com/2010/08/10-great-things-iphone-brought-to.html

I hate our current patent system, where everyone tries to patent everything they can. Even if you aren't suing others, there's incentive to patent everything you can defensively. That way when someone comes along and says "Hey, your Item X infringes on our patent Y, pay us money or we sue" you can say "Well, your Item Z infringes on our patents B and C. We can either take both situations to court, or you can license Patent Y to us in exchange for our licensing Patents B and C to you."

I'd like to believe this is one of the latter sort, especially as Apple used to mostly patent things defensively. Unfortunately, the lawsuit with HTC shows that Apple is no longer going to only be the defendant in patent cases, but will play the game from both sides.

I've missed the keyboard pop up and click on the iPad since it's release. Maybe it will be added in a future update.