And the new unlock mechanism. You can unlock any which way, instead of left to right, which was the case on almost all phones in the past.
Which is my cue as the old engineer to jump in with a little history about unlock gestures, for those who are interested
Back around the turn of the century (I've always wanted to say that about the year 2000), people wanted an easy way to secure and unlock their handheld touchscreen devices without punching numbers. Thus was born the gesture unlocker.
A small industry sprang up selling pattern-based device security software, especially for Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices. (A couple of those companies still survive today in the handheld security field.)
Coincidentally in 2002, an all-touch WinMo-based smartphone called the
Neonode N1 was shown with a simple left-to-right swipe-to-unlock gesture built-in. It also used swipes to move between pages. (Note its icon grid, btw.)
More than a few research papers were published about the best patterns to use to prevent others from figuring out your unlock code. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent from real life tests, that finger grease often left a perfect track on the screen for any information thief to follow. Oops!
Thus the swipe-to-unlock gesture faded from the scene, because it wasn't considered secure enough.
Jump forward to 2007 and the iPhone. Apple used the Neonode-like concept of a simple, repeatable unlock swipe. They smartly threw out the idea of it being about security, and actually drew the path for the user to take, along with a thumb progress indicator.
Because swipes had always had a security intent before, actually drawing the path to take was a novel feature, and Apple got a patent on a single-line version. (Frankly, I don't know how that got a patent, since any programmer told to do a swipe unlock with a visible help path would've come up with very similar items.)
Anyway, now you know. Swipe-to-unlock is over a decade old on handhelds, but the visible path is much newer.
