Motivated by previous work and the fact that about half of the users tend to place their phone on the table while being at home or at the office, we developed a new interaction method for smartphones which enables the interaction with the smartphone without actually picking it up. Instead, our new interaction method, called SurfaceSliding, focuses on the interaction through physically sliding the smartphone on the table. Investigating the suitability of the inertial sensors from nowadays smartphones in order to track the sliding movements at first, we eventually decided to implement an optical flow based solution using the images captured by the phone’s front camera. After implementing one use case within our system, we conducted a comparable user study for investigating the usability and efficiency of SurfaceSliding when comparing it to a more traditional input method like tapping. Although our results showed higher task completion times and higher error rates when using SurfaceSliding, our participants shared the opinion of having SurfaceSliding as an additional alternate input method for mobile devices.