Just when you thought slide-to-unlock was dead: Samsung owes Apple $120M in patent case

Bloomberg reports that Apple this week won an appeal in its long-running case against Samsung over its slide-to-unlock patent.

The decision reinstates an original $119.6 million verdict owed to Apple that a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled was wrongly thrown out in a previous decision back in February.

In this case, Apple claimed that Samsung infringed patents for the slide-to-unlock feature, autocorrect and a way to detect phone numbers so they can be tapped to make phone calls. The bulk of the award, $98.7 million, was for the detection patent that the earlier panel said wasn’t infringed. The February decision also said the other two patents were invalid… That was a wrong decision, the court ruled Friday, because it relied on issues that were never raised on appeal or on information that was beyond the trial record.

Apple notably no longer uses the “slide-to-unlock” feature (pictured above) in its latest version of the iOS 10 operating system for iPhone. Instead, the device now asks users to “press home button” to unlock their phone, either using the iPhone’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor or prompting for a passcode to authenticate the unlocking.

Today’s decision is ahead of another high-profile case between the companies that is scheduled to continue next week in a U.S. Supreme Court. The outcome of that case, according to the report, will determine how much Samsung owes Apple for infringing on its design patents for the iPhone.