Back in October of 2011, we reported that Apple had been granted the slide-to-unlock patent, a pretty important patent as far as smartphones are concerned, and recently it looks like Nokia has been granted a slide-to-unlock patent of their own, although in this case while the sliding motion is present, it differs from Apple’s own patent which hopefully will not cause either company to end up suing each other.
While Apple’s slide-to-unlock patent features sliding horizontally across the screen along a predefined path, Nokia’s version involves sliding an icon across a screen until it reveals a hidden app, which will launch once the icon that’s being dragged fully covers it. We’re guessing this can be used to launch predefined apps, like messages, emails, the browser, the camera, phone dialer, etc.
Oddly enough none of Nokia’s phones uses this patent at the moment, although given the nature of patents, it’s hard to tell if and when they might be made a reality. However it should be noted that this particular patent was applied for back in 2007, so there might be a good chance that this patent has since been discarded.