Edible Apple

Foss Patents reported late last week:

I just returned from the Munich I Regional Court, where Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Guntz publicly announced a decision in Apple’s favor: most of Motorola Mobility’s products were found to infringe on Apple’s slide-to-unlock image patent, EP1964022 on “unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image”. Today’s ruling is a permanent injunction that Apple could enforce at its own risk (against a bond).

The court evaluated three different embodiments. Apple won on the two that Motorola’s smartphones implement. It did not prevail on the third one, which the Xoom tablet uses. That implementation is very similar to what I have on my Samsung Galaxy Note: the user has to make a swiping gesture from the inside of a circle to the outside. It requires a relatively large screen to work somewhat well, but even then it’s not very intuitive.