Mobile Tech Podcast
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2010–2018
9:56 · 304K views · Jun 29, 2007
A 2007 video review of the Neonode N1m phone, which uses touch gestures including a swipe to unlock. It was published just before the iPhone's launch.
Used as evidence of prior art for slide-to-unlock in patent disputes involving Apple.
4 comments from Hacker News
Apple's problem isn't that the patents are stupid, it's that the inventions or ideas never belonged to them in the first place. In the vast majority of cases the idea or implementation already existed. Like the slide to unlock which was used at least since 2005 in a commercial device. [0][1] They also tried patenting a method to reduce power consumption of a chip by reducing voltage. Something that isn't just a law of nature (thus unpatentable) but was also used decades before ever since ICs were developed (thus "prior art"). One of the most controversial patents is the "rectangle with rounded corners". This was a design patent and these in general are usually not just very hard to enforce but also stupid in most cases. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Well here is a video of the Neonode prior art: this video It's unlocked with a left to right swipe. Contrary to the iPhone there is no image moving with the finger. I don't think that difference is worth a patent. Moving things (i.e. images) around with the finger is a pretty obvious concept for a purely touch-based device. See for example the Microsoft Surface (now renamed to PixelSense) from 2008: [LINK]
Also Neonode did this back in 2004/2005 with the N1. Apple's patent is a month old. Demo @ this video Edit: from question to statement.
Following video of Neonode N1 (cited in the article) shows slide to unlock feature predating the iphone this video