When Google’s business case for Android is to have hundreds of form factors, don’t you think that some form factors ought to look like the picture your article shows? Do you actually think that Apple OWNS the full touch screen slab look? You know many existed before – even though people like you may think this whole industry started when Apple released the iPhone.

A decade earlier, I introduce you to Handspring (among dozens doing similar things): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handspring_(company)
(of course it is not as beautiful or functional, but hardware technology was not that advanced then)

If you bother to READ the legal claims in Apples dress patents, and if you happen to know ANYTHING about this technology field and its history prior to IPhone release, you will absolutely laugh at what is claimed. Their dress patents just show pictures of a generic slab phone (not even true to the actual iPhone design) and simply claim the right to ANY design that looks similar – it is a joke since many before it looked even more similar to these pcitures. Another patent shows rows of icons and also simply claim the right to ANY design that looks similar – have you ever seen Windows Mobile icons rows?

So, whatever misconception you might be under that Apple invented a market that existed for more than a decade prior to them entering it, the legal claims they are asserting are easily challenged by the prior art.

Their strategy is to simply be a legal pest in order to protect whatever market position they feel entitled to, rather than continuing to innovate to protect that market.

You can patent a salami sandwich if you have a few $$$ to throw at it.

You clearly have no clue what you are talking about. The challenge is not to get the patent, but to make them stick in court. The USPTO is the most incompetent government organization out there – and I must know. Through a previous employer, my name ended up on a bunch of these patents that I don’t even recognize anymore after the lawyers went through them to make as broad as possible. The USPTO and the system we have IS a joke. It serves the total opposite of what is intended to do.

When Apple gets a majority of their claims thrown out, that’s a WIN for Samsung.

Whether you like the device or not, even back when it was current and there was nothing else like it, it sure as heck disproves all kinds of things Apple repeatedly tries to claim they invented and have some kind of exclusive right to.
Apple isn’t lust going after the rounded corners and chrome border, not that either of those properties should be remotely patentable, they’re going after any little thing they can get away with, using every flaw in the patent and legal systems, and bs-ing out of touch judges and manipulable juries. They repeatedly claim that they invented the very concept of a smartphone and all manner of trivial hardware, software, and ui details that both existed before they “invented” it, and are obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the relevant fields anyways.
Things like the the sph-i300 completely and utterly disprove all of that.

http://allthingsd.com/20120725/apple-google-warned-samsung-against-copying-us/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006