US D593087

I'll run targeted searches on the specific patent number, then summarize.

Let me verify whether any 2026 Federal Circuit activity specifically names D593087.

US D593,087 S — "Electronic Device" (Apple iPhone design)

Search scope and result on the 2026 docket question

I searched for the specific number D593087 / D593,087 against USPTO-facing and Federal Circuit/CAFC 2026 material.

No 2026 CAFC docket activity naming D593,087 was found. The most recent appellate events I could substantiate for this patent are the 2015 Federal Circuit affirmance and the 2016 Supreme Court reversal/remand with the 2017 CAFC remand opinion (below), followed by the 2018 district-court damages retrial and global settlement. Treat "no 2026 CAFC docket" as a search-result finding, not a certification that no such docket exists.

⚠️ False-positive warning (do not conflate): One 2026 result is a PTAB PGR in Netlist v. Samsung referencing an "'087 patent" with claim elements about "control die," "C/A signals" and "chip select signal." That is a utility patent (Netlist), not design patent D593,087. The string "'087" is coincidental.

Bibliographic data (per the patent text and USPTO/Google Patents record)

Inventors (14, as printed): Bartley K. Andre; Daniel J. Coster; Daniele De Iuliis; Richard P. Howarth; Jonathan P. Ive; Steve Jobs; Duncan Robert Kerr; Shin Nishibori; Matthew Dean Rohrbach; Douglas B. Satzger; Calvin Q. Seid; Christopher J. Stringer; Eugene Antony Whang; Rico Zorkendorfer.

Family / priority chain (as listed):

• Parent: US 29/270,880 → USD558,756 S, "Electronic device," filed Jan. 5, 2007; D'087 is a continuation of it. The Google Patents family table lists 29/270,880 with a priority date of 2006-09-11 and a filing date of 2007-01-05.
• Child: US 29/336,923 → USD613,736 S, filed May 12, 2009 (division).
• Foreign counterparts (family): AU315641S; AU316015S/AU316051S/AU316052S/AU316016S; CA121233S, CA131695S–CA131697S; TWD126995S1, TWD126997S1–TWD126999S1, TWD127626S1, TWD128127S1.
• Uncertainty flag: sources state the applicable priority date as 2007-01-05; a 2006-09-11 date appears only against the parent application in the family table. The literal filing date of D'087 itself is 2007-07-30, unambiguously.

Abstract

None exists. U.S. design patents do not carry a patent abstract, and no abstract appears in the D593,087 document. The entire textual disclosure is: (a) the 48 figure descriptions, (b) one paragraph of broken-line convention, and (c) the single claim. Any "abstract" attributed to this patent should be treated as an editorial paraphrase, not patent text.

The single claim

"The ornamental design of an electronic device, substantially as shown and described."

This is the only claim (Claims: 1). Design patents typically have one claim; there are no independent/dependent claim distinctions in the utility-patent sense. Ornamentality is defined by the 48 drawings.

Plain-language overview of what is claimed (Figs. 1–48, six embodiments)

• Structure: 48 figures = six embodiments, each with 8 views (front perspective, rear perspective, front, rear, top, bottom, left side, right side). Embodiments: Figs. 1–8 (1st), 9–16 (2nd), 17–24 (3rd), 25–32 (4th), 33–40 (5th), 41–48 (6th).
• Claimed subject matter (solid lines): the ornamental appearance of the front face of a handheld electronic device — a substantially planar, continuous front surface with a surrounding trim piece/bezel, shallow rounded corners, and an elongated, thin (narrow) side profile.
• Broken lines = environment (never claimed): "The broken lines showing the remainder of the electronic device are directed to environment. … None of the broken lines form a part of the claimed design."
• Broken lines within the claimed design = illustrative only, and they shift from embodiment to embodiment. Reading the specification text literally, the three features (a large rectangle representing a display area, an elongated oval representing an earpiece slot, and a circle representing a control button) are each drawn in broken lines in three of the six embodiments:

(The solid-line complement in the right-hand column is my inference from the specification's three broken-line groupings; the groupings themselves are quoted verbatim. Flagging as inference.)

• Practical import: because the display rectangle, earpiece slot, and button are broken in various embodiments, the patent's enforceable scope is the surrounding front surface/bezel and body shape, not the screen, speaker, or home button — a deliberately broad scope that later mattered substantially in litigation.
• District court claim construction (Apple v. Samsung, N.D. Cal. 5:11-cv-01846-LHK): the court construed the D'087 claim as directed to the ornamental design of an electronic device (not merely a front plate), with the broken-line features excluded. Uncertainty flag: I can confirm the substance of that construction from the 2012 order (Dkt. 1447, Order Amending Design Patent Claim Construction, July 29, 2012) and party briefs, but I do not have the verbatim construction language in front of me — verify the exact wording in the order if precision is needed.

Litigation and validity posture (grounding for the "family has litigation" flag)

• Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., N.D. Cal. No. 5:11-cv-01846-LHK. D'087 was one of the asserted design patents (with D504,889, D618,677, D604,305).
• Aug. 24, 2012 jury verdict: infringement found; ~$1.049B; reduced to ~$929.86M, of which $399M was the §289 "total profits" award tied to D593,087, D618,677, and D604,305.
• Fed. Cir. 2012 (interlocutory, 678 F.3d 1314): preliminary-injunction appeal addressing substantial similarity; court noted D'087 and JP D1241638 shared "similar edges and rounded corners, a bezel, a similarly shaped speaker, and similar proportions of screen and border."
• Fed. Cir. 2015 (786 F.3d 983, May 18, 2015): affirmed infringement and the total-profits award.
• Samsung Elecs. Co. v. Apple Inc., 580 U.S. 53 (No. 15-777, Dec. 6, 2016): reversed, holding "article of manufacture" in §289 is not limited to the end product sold to consumers; remanded. Contributed to the modern four-factor article-of-manufacture test.
• CAFC remand opinion Feb. 7, 2017; new damages trial in N.D. Cal. (2018) resulted in a $539M award; the parties settled globally in June 2018.
• Validity challenges: Samsung's expert reports argued D'087 was anticipated or obvious over e.g. JP D1241638, JP D1241383, and KR 30-0398307 (Bluebird Soft). The jury rejected invalidity; the court denied JMOL, noting Samsung had to show the design as a whole was "dictated by function," which it did not.
• Terminal disclaimer (Nov. 2012): Apple disclaimed the terminal part of D618,677 so its term matched D593,087's May 26, 2023 expiry, to blunt Samsung's double-patenting attack.

Items I cannot state with high confidence

1. Any 2026 CAFC activity — not found; the only 2026 hit is an unrelated utility-patent PGR.
2. The exact wording of the D'087 claim construction order (July 29, 2012).
3. The effective priority date (2007-01-05 per USPTO/Google "prior art date," with 2006-09-11 appearing against the parent in the family table).
4. The solid-line/broken-line assignment per embodiment in the table above is inferred by exclusion from the specification's three broken-line groupings.

Primary sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD593087S1/en (full specification text); CAFC 678 F.3d 1314 (2012); CAFC 786 F.3d 983 (2015); 580 U.S. 53 (2016); N.D. Cal. 5:11-cv-01846-LHK docket materials (Dkt. 1447; Dkt. 3592-20; Dkt. 1384-21).

I'll research litigation involving US patent D593087.

Let me dig into specific case dockets and other potential suits.

Now let me check the HTC matter and ITC investigations specifically.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" data against public PTAB and Federal Circuit sources before finalizing.

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding.

Proceedings overview

The USPTO Open Data Portal reports zero AIA trial proceedings against US D593087 — 0 IPRs, 0 PGRs, 0 CBMs — and my independent public-source check (PTAB/ODP records as surfaced through web search, Federal Circuit and district court records, and secondary literature) found no petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal naming this patent as the subject patent. My web verification surfaced no proceeding I can name, so I will not name one. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "claims canceled" and not "claims hardened in an AIA trial" — it is "the design patent's single claim was never tested at the PTAB, but it was fully litigated to the Supreme Court in district court, has been expired since 2023-05-26, and the only thing the Supreme Court actually took away from the patent owner was the damages theory, not the patent."

Two structural facts drive this:

• PGR was legally unavailable. D593087's effective filing date is 2007-01-05 (priority) / 2007-07-30 (filing), so it predates the March 16, 2013 AIA PGR cutoff. See the family data at https://patents.google.com/patent/USD593087S1/en.
• CBM was practically unavailable. A CBM petition requires a patent claiming a "financial product or service" (AIA § 18(d)(1)). An ornamental design for the front face of a handheld electronic device does not qualify.
• IPR was available in theory (35 U.S.C. § 311(a) reaches design patents) and no one filed one — despite the patent being asserted against a well-funded defendant (Samsung) for seven years.

No AIA trial proceeding to enumerate

Under the instructions, claims-invalidated proceedings go to the top. There are none. I am explicitly recording the null result rather than manufacturing proceeding numbers.

Non-AIA post-grant activity on this patent and its siblings (context, NOT AIA trials)

This is the most common source of confusion about D593087, so it is worth separating cleanly from PTAB work.

Note the pattern: the reexamination attacks landed on the siblings D'677 and D'678, not on D'087. See IPWatchdog, The Power of Portfolio: Strong Design Patents III (http://marketsandpatents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/power-of-strong-design-patents.pdf) and https://ipwatchdog.com/tag/design-applications/.

For the district-court record that produced the invalidity evidence a future challenger would mine:

• Samsung's invalidity expert report on the D'087 prior art: https://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.cand.[239768](/patent/239768)/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.2255.22.pdf (identifies KR 30-0398307 to Bluebird Soft, published 2005-11-15, and JP D1241638 to Sharp, published 2005-06-06, among ~10 references).
• Samsung's claim-construction brief cataloguing the crowded prior-art field: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/candce/5:2011cv01846/[239768/1356](https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/search/patent/reelFrameDetail?reelFrame=239768-1356)/0.pdf
• 2018 article-of-manufacture expert reports (post-SCOTUS remand): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.239768/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.3592.20.pdf and https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.239768/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.3672.2.pdf

Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. D593087 has exactly one claim: "The ornamental design of an electronic device, substantially as shown and described." It is UNTESTED at the PTAB — no claim was canceled, none was confirmed. It is, however, judicially sustained on validity: the jury rejected Samsung's invalidity case, the district court upheld it, and the Federal Circuit affirmed the design-patent infringement and validity holdings in Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., 786 F.3d 983 (Fed. Cir. 2015). The Supreme Court in Samsung Elecs. Co. v. Apple Inc., 580 U.S. 53 (2016) (No. 15-777) reversed and remanded only on the § 289 "article of manufacture" damages question — it vacated the $399M award without disturbing the validity or infringement holdings. On remand the Federal Circuit (2017-02-07) sent the apportionment question back to Judge Koh's court, which ordered a new trial on 2017-10-22; the case ended in a global settlement in 2018. All of this is district-court and Article III history. If you want the record, search CourtListener for the N.D. Cal. docket (5:11-cv-01846) and the Fed. Cir. appeals; I have linked only the RECAP documents I could actually verify above.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR ever reached a final written decision against D087, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is at zero. No petitioner, no privy, and no real party in interest is estopped as to this patent. A defendant today may raise any § 102 or § 103 ground (and § 112 where applicable to designs) without an IPR-estoppel overlay. The only soft constraint is issue preclusion for parties in privity with Samsung as to grounds actually litigated and necessarily decided in the N.D. Cal. case — and even there, the Federal Circuit's invalidity affirmance was a merits affirmance, not a ground-specific estoppel. Samsung's own prior-art theories (the Bluebird KR '307 and Sharp JP '638 references and the rest of its KR/JP/EU design-art collection) remain fully available to a new defendant; they were raised in district court and lost, but a PTAB panel is a different factfinder on a different record.

Pattern signals. (1) No repeat petitioner — there is no petitioner at all. (2) The patent owner litigated aggressively in Article III courts, not at the PTAB: Apple's D087 strategy was to broaden via continuations (D558,756 → D593,087 → D618,678), converting solid lines to broken lines, then to defend the narrow solid-line claim in district court. (3) No defensive aggregator in the chain — Unified Patents, RPX and similar entities have no proceeding, and given a 2023 expiration there is no economic reason for one to appear now. (4) The family's post-grant pressure came from third parties and landed elsewhere (D677, D678 ex parte reexams), which tells you the true vulnerability was in the siblings, not D087.

Term status (the fact that dominates everything). Google Patents records an anticipated expiration of 2023-05-26 for D593087 (14 years from the 2009-05-26 grant, consistent with the pre-2015 design term). The patent is expired as of today's date, 2026-09-30. That is a stronger defense than any IPR would have provided.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and the patent has claims invalidated: it does not. There is no FWD to quote and no disposition to link. Anyone who tells you D087 was invalidated at the PTAB is confusing it with (i) the ex parte reexamination of D618,677, or (ii) the Federal Circuit/SCOTUS damages rulings in Apple v. Samsung, in which the infringement and validity findings survived.

If active proceedings are pending: none are, so no institution deadline, no oral-hearing date, and no statutory one-year FWD deadline are in play.

Practical defense posture, in priority order:

1. Expiration. D593087 expired 2023-05-26. Any demand letter citing it can only reach past acts, and only those within the § 286 six-year lookback from the filing date of a complaint. On a hypothetical complaint filed on 2026-09-30, recoverable acts would have to post-date roughly 2020-09-30 and pre-date 2023-05-26. Press the patent owner to identify actual pre-expiration accused sales of your product.
2. No AIA-trial shortcut exists for you either. You cannot ride anyone else's IPR. If you want a PTAB ruling, you would have to file your own petition — and for an expired patent the practical value is low, with the § 315(b) one-year bar running from service of any complaint.
3. § 289 apportionment. The single most useful body of law for you is Samsung v. Apple, 580 U.S. 53 (2016), which holds the "article of manufacture" need not be the whole end product. If you make a multi-component device, force the patent owner to identify the article of manufacture and prove total profit on that article. The 2018 N.D. Cal. expert reports linked above lay out both sides' competing methodologies and Judge Koh's four-factor framework — useful templates.
4. Invalidity. The prior-art universe Samsung assembled (KR 30-0398307, JP D1241638, JP D1280315, KR 30-0304213, EU RCD 000569157-0005, LG KE850 Prada, and the Meizu M8) is public and unstoppably reusable. No estoppel applies. Design-patent obviousness under § 103 with KSR-style reasoning plus a Rosen/Kaufman-style primary-reference analysis is the theory to develop.

The absence signal, stated plainly. D593087 is one of the most famous and most monetized design patents in history, asserted against the world's largest phone maker, litigated to the Supreme Court, and flagged in Google's family data as having worldwide family litigation. It nonetheless attracted zero AIA trial petitions. That is not because it is invincible — the D'677 and D'678 siblings drew reexamination attacks — it is because Samsung's chosen forum was the district court, where it lost on validity and had to fight the damages question up to the Supreme Court instead. Read the null PTAB result as "no PTAB precedent, pro or con," and build your defense on expiry, § 286, § 289 apportionment, and the public prior art.

Caveat on confidence. The canonical source for this report is the structured ODP block supplied in this prompt, which is empty. I verified that null result through web search rather than a direct authenticated PTAB E2E / PatentCenter query, so I cannot exclude a very old or thinly indexed filing. Given the patent's prominence and the identity of the accused infringer, I assess that residual risk as low. If you need certainty, pull the full prosecution and post-grant file via USPTO PatentCenter (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) and run the patent number through PTAB Center / the PTAB API at https://developer.uspto.gov/ptab-api before relying on this in a filing.

I'll research the assignment record for US D593087.

Let me look for the Justia record and the USPTO assignment data directly.

Assignment / ownership analysis — US D593087 ("Electronic device")

Verification caveat up front (important). I attempted to pull the USPTO Assignment Center record for D593087 (searched by patent number, by application number US 29/282,833, and by the parent/child family members) plus the mirrored abstract-of-title data on Google Patents, Justia, and PEDS/ODP. My retrievals returned no reel/frame assignment entries for this patent. I could not confirm whether that reflects (a) genuinely no recorded post-issuance assignments, or (b) a retrieval failure on the assignment database (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov is behind a JS interface that my tools could not render). Because I cannot distinguish those two cases, I do not claim "no assignments exist" — I report only what I verified and mark the rest as unverified. No reel/frame numbers are stated below because I did not observe any and will not fabricate them.

One structural fact worth noting regardless: the Google Patents legal-events feed for D593087 shows only four events — filed by Apple Inc. (2007-07-30), priority, grant (2009-05-26), anticipated expiration (2023-05-26). It contains no assignment, change of name, security interest, or license events. That feed is not a substitute for the Assignment Center, but its emptiness is consistent with Apple retaining title continuously from issue to expiration.

Inventors

All 14 named inventors, with their city of record on the face of the patent (from the printed front page reproduced in the Apple v. Samsung file history, Ex. 6 / Dkt. 944):

Pattern assessment — no adverse signal. The classic red flags for a portfolio fire-sale are not visible here: there is no evidence of mass inventor departure within 12 months of the 2007-01-05 priority date, and the team is identifiable as Apple's in-house Industrial Design organization (the same names recur across Apple's D504889, D558756, D618677, D604305, D670286 design family). I could not independently verify individual departure dates from primary sources, so I leave that as unverified rather than asserted. Note the family is a continuation chain, not a fresh filing: US 29/282,833 is a continuation of US 29/270,880 (issued as D558756, filed 2007-01-05), and itself spawned a division, US 29/336,923 (issued as D613736, filed 2009-05-12). Continuation/division structure like this is normal defensive design-portfolio practice by an operating company and is not by itself an NPE indicator.

Original assignee

Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA (assignee on the face of the patent; also reported as assignee by Justia and by the Select IP patent profile).

• Product embodying the claim: Yes — the claimed design is the front-face design of the original iPhone (the "black slab with rounded corners, bezel, earpiece slot, home button" front face). The 2012 Apple v. Samsung jury specifically found that Samsung phones embodying this front-face design infringed, and Apple's own 2007 product launch (iPhone, announced 2007-01-09) predates the 2007-07-30 filing.
• Primary line of business: Consumer electronics, software, and services.
• Current status: Operating, publicly traded (NASDAQ: AAPL). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or restructuring. Change of corporate name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. occurred 2007-01-09, i.e. after the parent's 2006-09-11 priority date but the issued patent already names "Apple Inc.," so no post-issuance name-change assignment was required to correct this record.
• Prosecution correspondent of record (not an assignment correspondent): Customer No. 63975, Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox P.L.L.C. (attorneys of record in the file history include Tracy-Gene G. Durkin and colleagues, per the prosecution papers exhibited at Dkt. 944 in Apple v. Samsung, APLPROS0000010417–10423). This is the prosecution firm; I found no evidence of any assignment-recording correspondent for this patent.

Assignment timeline

No recorded assignment (reel/frame) entry was verified for US D593087. The Assignment Center abstract of title could not be retrieved with the tools available, and the secondary aggregators I checked (Google Patents legal events, Justia, the patent-family pages for D558756/D613736) show no assignment, security-agreement, merger, or license conveyance for this patent. The Google Patents legal-event list for D593087 is limited to filing (2007-07-30), grant (2009-05-26), and anticipated expiration (2023-05-26).

Per the task instruction for the no-records case, I state that plainly. I do not stop entirely here, because the "no records" conclusion is unverified rather than confirmed — so the sections below are provided with that limitation flagged and the verdict weighted accordingly.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US D593087
    2006 : Family priority date Sep 11
    2007 : Parent D558756 filed Jan 5
         : This application filed Jul 30 by Apple Inc
    2009 : Patent issued May 26
         : Division D613736 filed May 12
    2011 : Apple sues Samsung over this patent
    2012 : Jury finds Samsung infringed
    2016 : Supreme Court remands on damages
    2023 : Design patent term expires May 26

There is deliberately no assignee-change node in this diagram: no transfer was verified, and the family appears to have remained with Apple Inc. for the entire 14-year term.

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Every signal is assessed against the verified public record; where verification failed, that is stated.

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. No licensing-LLC assignee (no "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity) appears anywhere in the family. The only assignee of record on the face of the patent and in every secondary source is Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA. No single-purpose Delaware/Texas LLC, no registered-agent-service address.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Current and prior assignee is Apple Inc., which does not appear on the RPX/Unified Patents high-frequency-plaintiff lists, nor on the Acacia / Marathon / Intellectual Ventures / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Vringo / Pendrell / Innovatio / MPHJ / Lumen View / Round Rock / Document Generation Corp lists. To the contrary, Apple is itself a target of NPE suits, not an asserter through NPEs.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — not present / not applicable. With no recorded conveyances, there is no recording correspondent to test for recurrence. The only recurring attorney name associated with this patent is the prosecution firm Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox (Customer No. 63975) — a large general-practice IP firm that does both operating-company and other patent work; a single firm doing the prosecution is not a finding under this signal.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. No consecutive or chained assignments were verified. The only "chain" here is a continuation/division chain of patent applications (29/270,880 → 29/282,833 → 29/336,923), which is intra-company prosecution practice, not ownership churn.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. The first infringement assertion naming D593087 was Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co., N.D. Cal. No. 5:11-cv-01846, filed 2011-04. No assignment within six months before that filing was verified; the patent was held by Apple from issue (2009-05-26) through the 2011 filing. Standing was Apple's own, not acquired for the suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Apple Inc. is not a bankruptcy estate, and no Chapter 7/11 sale of this patent was found. It did not appear in the Kodak, Nortel, or Polaroid-type asset sales.

7. Privateering — not present. Apple asserted D593087 in its own name against a direct competitor (Samsung), a genuine operating-company-vs-operating-company dispute. There is no evidence of transfer to an NPE to assert on Apple's behalf; no SEC 8-K/10-K disclosure of such a transfer was found, and none was expected.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN; Apple retained the patent through expiration on 2023-05-26.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

Apple Inc. is the only assignee of record, has continuously owned D593087 from issue (2009-05-26) to expiration (2023-05-26), ships the iPhone that embodies the claimed design, and asserted the patent in its own name against a competing operating company — which is the opposite of the NPE fact pattern. Caveat: because I could not retrieve reel/frame-level entries from the Assignment Center, this verdict rests on (a) the face-of-patent assignee, (b) the absence of any assignment event in the Google Patents legal-events feed, and (c) the litigation record showing Apple as plaintiff-of-record; if you require reel/frame confirmation of the absence of post-issuance transfers, treat the ownership conclusion as Insufficient data pending a manual Assignment Center query.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center — query patent number D593087; or assignment.uspto.gov — same underlying records. Cross-check the family members D558756 (parent) and D613736 (child), which should show the identical assignee if Apple's title was uninterrupted.

Consistency with prior sections: This analysis is consistent with the earlier litigation summary (Apple v. Samsung, 2012 N.D. Cal. jury verdict; Samsung v. Apple, 580 U.S. ___ (2016) on §289 total profits). No contradiction identified — both sections describe Apple as plaintiff and owner. The only unresolved item is the assignment-database retrieval gap noted above.

I'll run targeted searches to verify the reference citations and locate the USPTO record for D593087.

Let me verify the key prior-art references' dates and identities.

Scope of the search and the USPTO record

I searched for the exact string D593087 / D593,087 and excluded similar numbers. The authoritative record is:

⚠️ Do not conflate (carry-over caution): the "‘087 patent" in the 2026 Netlist v. Samsung PGR is a utility patent about control die / C/A signals / chip-select. Unrelated to D593,087. Likewise, "US D593,087" must not be confused with D 5,930,87-adjacent numbers, D 5,935,087, or the sibling Apple designs D558,756 / D613,736 (same family, different claims).

Note on method: the live result set I could reach returned the Google Patents record (which mirrors USPTO bibliographic data), the USPTO-source copy of the granted front page (thetmca.com PDF), and USPTO/JP/KR documents filed in litigation. I was not able to open USPTO Patent Center / Patent Public Search directly in this session, so treat the citation list below as reproduced from the patent's own printed front page rather than re-keyed from Patent Center.

Threshold point that governs every § 102 answer

D593,087 has exactly one claim. Its text is:

"The ornamental design of an electronic device, substantially as shown and described."

Therefore, for every reference below, the only possible § 102 answer is: does it anticipate Claim 1? There are no independent/dependent claims to differentiate. Two consequences:

1. Anticipation of a design claim requires a single reference disclosing a design that is "substantially the same" to the ordinary observer (Int'l Seaway Trading Corp. v. Walgreens Corp., 589 F.3d 1233 (Fed. Cir. 2009); In re Bartlett). Element-by-element matching is the wrong test — the design as a whole must be the same. That is why the overwhelming majority of the 56 cited documents cannot anticipate.
2. Same-inventor references are not § 102(a)/(b) art. D593,087's 14 named inventors include Andre, Coster, De Iuliis, Howarth, Ive, Jobs, Kerr, Nishibori, Rohrbach, Satzger, Seid, Stringer, Whang and Zorkendorfer. Any citation naming that same inventive entity (Apple's own Andre et al. designs) is not "by another" and cannot anticipate — it is relevant, if at all, to double patenting or § 103.

Also relevant to scope: the specification states the broken-line features (display rectangle, elongated oval earpiece, circle button) are illustrative and unclaimed, so the § 102 comparison is against the continuous front surface + surrounding bezel/trim + rounded-corner rectangular body, not against screen/speaker/button details.

Tier 1 — The only references with genuine § 102 anticipation potential

These are the references actually pressed as anticipatory against Claim 1. Important finding: none of the four foreign designs below appears in the granted patent's own "Citations (56)" list — they entered the record through Samsung's invalidity contentions and the Chinese invalidation requests. That is a meaningful gap worth flagging.

1. JP D1241638 (Sharp) — the strongest anticipation theory

• Citation: Japanese Design Registration No. 1241638, SHARP Kabushiki Kaisha (creator Koyama, Keiichi); Article: "portable telephone with camera" (partial design); Locarno 14-03; Design Class H3-30.
• Dates: Filed 2004-10-18 (Application D2004-31512); registered 2005-04-15; published 2005-06-06.
• Description: Rectangular body with four evenly rounded corners; flat/transparent front face over an inset display; interior rectangle with square corners having narrow side borders and wider top/bottom borders; small horizontally-oriented lozenge-shaped earpiece slot centered side-to-side near the top; curved bezel/trim piece surrounding the front face. (Some views show a slider configuration, which Samsung argued is irrelevant because D'087 claims only the front-face design.)
• § 102 vs. Claim 1: Anticipation is arguable and was squarely asserted. Samsung's expert (Arnold, Dkt. 1384-21) opined: "JP638 anticipates D'087, because the front face view discloses all elements of the D'087 claimed by Apple," noting the missing circular button is disclaimed in embodiments 2, 3 and 6 of D'087. Against that: (a) JP'638's lozenge slot is narrower and higher; (b) D'087's claimed front surface is described as featuring a pronounced curved bezel/trim, whereas JP'638's face is only slightly curved top and bottom; (c) a partial design registration may not disclose the whole article as claimed. This is the best single-reference § 102 challenge on the record — but Apple prevailed (see validity posture in the earlier sections), and the examiner did not cite it.

2. KR 30-0398307 (Bluebird Soft Co., Ltd.)

• Citation: Korean Registered Design 30-0398307, Bluebird Soft Co., Ltd. ("Pidion").
• Dates: registered 2005-11-07; published 2005-11-15.
• Description (from the litigation record): rectangular form with four equally curved corners, a curved trim piece/bezel covering a portion of the front planar face, a centered rectangle, and a small oblong shape near the top edge, horizontally centered.
• § 102 vs. Claim 1: Anticipation was asserted and rejected. The court's/parties' comparison concluded the accused products were more similar to KR'307 than to D'087 in several respects, yet the reference was used principally to narrow D'087's scope (crowded field) rather than to invalidate it. On the literal § 102 test (whole-design identity), KR'307's visible front rectangle and oblong slot differ from D'087's "almost no gap" bezel geometry, so anticipation is weak; it is far stronger as a § 103/scope-limitation reference.

3. JP D1241383

• Citation: Japanese Design Registration D1241383; issued 2005-06-06 (per Samsung's interrogatory responses).
• Description: Overall rectangular shape with evenly rounded corners, flat front face, large rectangular display centered both horizontally and vertically, screen inset between two very narrow side borders and two more substantial top/bottom borders; includes additional side buttons.
• § 102 vs. Claim 1: Anticipation asserted ("JP383 anticipates D'087, because the front face view discloses all elements"). Weakness: the additional side buttons are ornamentation appearing in the reference but not the claimed design, and the whole-design identity test is not satisfied on the record's own description. Better characterized as § 103 material.

4. EU Registered Community Design 000569157-0005 (embodied in the LG KE850 "Prada")

• Citation: European Union design rights registration 000569157-0005; application submitted September 2006. Commercial embodiment: LG KE850 Prada — first announced 2006-12-12, official press release 2007-01-18, retail March 2007; iF Design Award and Red Dot Award Fall 2006.
• Description: Flat front face, rectangular shape with evenly rounded corners, oval earpiece hole centered at the top of the device, inset rectangular display, large touchscreen occupying most of the front real estate, minimal front ornamentation, ~12 mm thick.
• § 102 vs. Claim 1: Date-sensitive and important. The Prada's December 2006 public disclosure and September 2006 EU registration predate D'087's 2007-01-05 priority date, so it is § 102(a)-class art (not § 102(b), which needs >1 year before filing). Because § 102(a) requires disclosure "before the invention thereof by the applicant," the Prada can only anticipate if Apple's invention date is later than the Prada's disclosure date — a fact question. It was cited in the record as § 102-adjacent art and scope-limiting art ("JP 638, KR30-0398307, Bluebird Pidion, JP 221, LG KE850 Prada"). Note the LG Prada has fewer front-face hardware buttons and a different bezel than the D'087 embodiments — a real whole-design difference.

5. Apple's own Andre et al. references — excluded by the same-inventor rule

Cited on D'087's front page and sharing the same 14-inventor entity: D504,889 (filed 2004-03-17, issued 2005-05-10, "Electronic device," 29/201,636), D538,822 (2004-06-24 / 2007-03-20), D541,298 and D541,299 (2005-08-24 / 2007-04-24, "Media device"), D548,747 (2005-08-24 / 2007-08-14, "Media device"). Also D558,756/757/758 (filed 2007-01-05, issued 2008-01-01).

• § 102 vs. Claim 1: None of these can anticipate under § 102(a)/(b) because they are not "by another." D558,756 is the parent application (continuation) and is not prior art at all — it is the priority document. D504,889 (the tablet-like design asserted in the parallel Apple v. Samsung case) is a different article/proportion set and was not found infringed by the Galaxy Tab 10.1 by the jury.

Tier 2 — The 56 patent citations on the granted front page

Every entry below is assessed against the sole claim. Unless stated, the answer is "does not anticipate Claim 1" — either because (a) the reference is same-inventor Apple art, (b) the reference is non-analogous subject matter (it is not a handheld electronic-device front face at all), or (c) even where analogous, the disclosed overall design differs in the whole-design sense. "§ 102 class" indicates the statutory subsection the citation supports.

(*) = flagged in the Google Patents table as cited by the examiner; the remaining rows it treats as cited otherwise. Treat that attribution as indicative, not certified.

Net Tier-2 conclusion: not one of the 56 front-page patent citations anticipates Claim 1 as a matter of whole-design identity, and 11 of them (rows 14, 18, 29–31, 52–54, plus the Apple media-device references) are precluded outright by the same-inventive-entity rule. Their real function in the record is to show a crowded field, narrowing D'087's scope — exactly the use Samsung made of them.

Tier 3 — Foreign registered-design documents on the printed front page that Google's "Citations (56)" table omits

The granted front page's "References Cited" block also lists six foreign design documents that the Google Patents citation table does not itemize. Flagging this as a discrepancy between sources:

Tier 4 — The 40 non-patent citations

These are the references the examiner/record places in the "Non-Patent Citations (40)" category. Note the date problem: with a 2007-01-05 priority date, several entries (Samsung F700, LG KF700, Samsung F490, Meizu M8, the Mobiz iPhone review) post-date the priority date and are not § 102(b) art.

Published devices / press (18 items):

Apple's own co-pending design applications (22 items) — U.S. Appl. Nos. 29/270,887 (filed 2007-01-08); 29/282,831; 29/282,832; 29/282,834; 29/284,187; 29/284,188; 29/284,269; 29/284,271; 29/284,272; 29/284,276; 29/284,288; 29/284,308; 29/284,310; 29/284,312; 29/306,334; 29/306,950; 29/319,239; 29/319,377; 29/319,433; 29/324,130; 29/324,137; 29/324,262.

• § 102 vs. Claim 1: None can anticipate. All are Andre et al. — i.e., the same inventive entity as D'087 — so they are not "by another" under § 102(a)/(b) or § 102(e). They are the continuation/divisional family and are relevant (if at all) to obviousness-type double patenting or as continuity evidence.
• Note the filing-date sequence (Jan. 8, 2007 → Sep. 9, 2008) confirms D'087 was one filing in a large coordinated design-portfolio filing campaign, not an isolated application.

Bottom line

1. USPTO record confirmed: D593,087 S, application 29/282,833, filed 2007-07-30, granted 2009-05-26, one claim, Apple Inc., expired.
2. There is only one claim, so every § 102 question is "does this reference anticipate Claim 1?" — and the test is whole-design substantial identity (Int'l Seaway), not element-by-element identity.
3. Ranked § 102 candidates on the record:
   1. JP D1241638 (Sharp) — filed 2004-10-18, registered 2005-04-15, published 2005-06-06. Strongest express anticipation opinion in the record (litigation expert Arnold). Not cited on the granted front page.
   2. KR 30-0398307 (Bluebird Soft) — registered/published Nov. 2005. Anticipation asserted; better used to narrow scope.
   3. EU RCD 000569157-0005 / LG KE850 Prada — Sept. 2006 registration; device public Dec. 2006. Predates the 2007-01-05 priority date, so date-qualified; whole-design differences remain.
   4. JP D1241383 — issued 2005-06-06. Anticipation asserted; additional side buttons cut against identity.
4. None of the 56 front-page patent citations anticipates Claim 1, and 11+ are excluded by the same-inventive-entity rule (Apple's own Andre et al. designs, including D504,889, D538,822, D541,298/299, D548,747, D558,757/758 — with D558,756 being the non-prior-art parent).
5. Two source discrepancies worth recording: (a) Google's "Citations (56)" table itemizes 56 U.S. documents but omits the six foreign registered designs printed on the front page (EM 000569157-0005; JP D1159881; JP D1250487; KR 30-0394921; KR 30-0422221; KR 30-0452432); (b) the four strongest anticipatory references (JP D1241638, JP D1241383, KR 30-0398307, EU 000569157-0005) are not in the patent's own citation list at all — they appear only in the litigation/invalidation record.

Confidence and limits: Bibliographic data, the citation list, figure text and the claim are high-confidence (patent text supplied as authoritative). My § 102 conclusions for Tier-2/3/4 references are based on titles, dates and the litigation descriptions — I did not have the reference drawings in front of me for most of the 56 items, so I have not affirmed or denied visual identity from inspection. The Tier-1 assessments rest on the parties' and experts' descriptions. If you need a per-reference drawing-by-drawing comparison, each of these references must be pulled individually (JP/KR/EM registers and the D'087 figure set).

Primary sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD593087S1/en ; https://www.thetmca.com/files/2016/01/AppleDesignPatents.pdf (USPTO front page repro); https://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.cand.[239768](/patent/239768)/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.1089.7.pdf (cited-references list and § 102 discussion); https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/[4178089/1384](https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/search/patent/reelFrameDetail?reelFrame=4178089-1384)/21/apple-inc-v-samsung-electronics-co-ltd/ (Arnold anticipation opinions on JP D1241638 / JP D1241383); https://www.archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.cand.239768/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.2255.22.pdf (Table B II prior-art survey; KR 30-0398307 dates); https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.239768/gov.uscourts.cand.239768.1991.23.pdf (JP D1241638 registration text); https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sb310 (LG KE850 Prada announcement dates).

I'll verify key prior-art reference details and dates before building the §103 combinations.

Obviousness analysis — US D593,087 S ("Electronic device") under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Two flags before the analysis

Date contradiction. The header of this task states the current date is April 26, 2026, while the previously generated sections carry "Today's date is 2026-09-30." I am treating April 26, 2026 as the operative date (it is the instruction in the current task) and noting the conflict rather than silently reconciling it.

Evidentiary limitation. I have the textual record of D593,087 and its full prior-art citation apparatus (56 patent citations, 40 non-patent citations, plus the family citation lists), but I did not retrieve or visually inspect the drawing sheets of D593,087 or of the individual cited references in this session. Every visual-comparison statement below is therefore provisional and must be confirmed against the actual figures. Where I extrapolate from a reference's title, date, and art-field rather than its drawing, I say so.

1. Governing law as of April 26, 2026

D593,087 was filed July 30, 2007 (continuation of US 29/270,880, filed Jan. 5, 2007), so pre-AIA §§ 102/103 govern. But the obviousness framework has changed materially since this patent was last litigated:

• Rosen–Durling is overruled. LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC, 102 F.4th 1280 (Fed. Cir. May 21, 2024) (en banc) held the "basically the same" primary-reference gate and the "so related" secondary-reference gate "improperly rigid," and replaced them with the Graham factors as applied in the design context (Akin Gump summary; Practical Law).
• What survives. (i) A primary reference must still be identified — it must exist "as a whole," not be assembled from selected features — but it "need not be 'basically the same'"; the more visually similar it is, the stronger the case. (ii) An analogous-art requirement now applies to every reference; same field of endeavor (here: handheld electronic devices) satisfies it. (iii) A non-hindsight motivation to modify/combine must still be articulated (Mechanics article on Graham factor one post-LKQ).
• 2025–2026 confirmation. Dynamite Marketing, Inc. v. WowLine, Inc. (Fed. Cir. late 2025) confirmed that a primary reference and a record-supported, non-hindsight motivation remain necessary; Top Glory Trading Group Inc. v. Cole Haan LLC (2026) shows the Director will institute IPR against a long-issued design patent on the "change in law" rationale — relevant because D593,087 expired May 26, 2023 yet remains challengeable for retrospective purposes (Mondaq, Apr. 8, 2026).

Consequence: the 2012 jury's rejection of Samsung's § 103 defense and the court's denial of JMOL — decided under Rosen–Durling, with the court noting Samsung had not shown the design was "dictated by function" — no longer control the analysis. Under LKQ, D593,087's obviousness exposure is materially greater.

2. What must actually be proved obvious — the claim is six designs, not one

Building on the earlier section's per-embodiment broken/solid-line table (not repeated here): the single claim covers six embodiments, and the solid-line subject matter differs among them. For § 103, each embodiment is a separate "design as a whole."

This matters: a combination strong against Emb. 4 (rectangle + button) may be irrelevant to Emb. 3 (oval alone).

3. Prior-art gate — what is actually available (this is where most of the citation list falls away)

Group 1 — usable prior art (on the face of the record):

Group 2 — date-critical (prior art only if the invention date is later than 2007-01-05, or if an earlier publication exists):

• LG KE850 "Prada" — first announced Dec. 12, 2006, official press release Jan. 18, 2007; the gsmarena/Comms Business write-ups tie it to the iF product design award, prize awarded Sept. 2006, where its "streamlined display with 'concealed' keypad" was publicly described (Wikipedia/LG Prada, gsmarena, Jan. 17, 2007, New Atlas). The Sept. 2006 iF publication is the date that converts the Prada from non-art into § 102(a) art — this is the single most important evidentiary question in the case.
• Meizu M8 (posted Jan. 29, 2007) and Samsung Ultra Smart F700 (announced Feb. 8, 2007) — after the Jan. 5, 2007 priority date. Not § 102(a)/(b) art on these dates. Note, however, that the Samsung F700 Wikipedia entry references a Korean design patent filed December 2006 for the "black, rectangular, round-cornered" handset (Samsung SGH-F700) — a December 2006 filing is not itself prior art unless published, so this needs checking.

Group 3 — NOT prior art (do not use):

• Post-filing references in the citation lists: LG KF700 (announced Feb. 2008), Samsung F490 (announced Jan. 2008), USD602,486, USD633,090/091/092, USD581,894, USD565,596, USD587,697/048/089, USD595,681, USD600,690, USD606,044, and similar. These appear because Google aggregates citations across the family; several carry 2007-08-31 through 2008-09-05 filing dates — i.e., after D593,087 was filed.
• Apple's own co-pending sibling applications cited as NPL (29/270,887; 29/282,831–834; 29/284,187–312; 29/306,334/950; 29/319,239–433; 29/324,130–262). All were filed Jan. 8, 2007 or later — after the Jan. 5, 2007 invention date — so none qualifies even as § 102(e) art. (The parent 29/270,880 was filed Jan. 5, 2007; the siblings miss by three days and more.) Even if one had qualified, pre-AIA § 103(c) would disqualify commonly owned § 102(e)-only art from the § 103 analysis. The same logic excludes Apple's D538,822 (issued 2007-03-20, § 102(e)-only, commonly owned).
• The iPhone's own January 2007 announcement and the Mobiz iPhone review — Apple's own work, not "by others" under § 102(a), and within the grace period.

4. The Graham factors applied

(1) Scope and content of the analogous prior art. The field is handheld/portable electronic devices — media players, PDAs, handheld computers, cellular phones, and their front panels and housings. Group 1 supplies a dense, mature field. Two front-face conventions were well established before Jan. 5, 2007: (a) the media-player convention — rectangular slab with rounded corners, flush large display, and a circular control element (the iPod click wheel appears in Apple's own Oct. 2004 U2 iPod publication; circular buttons also in Samsung D532,791, Creative D528,561, Tatung D489,731); and (b) the phone/PDA convention — rectangular slab front panel with a large display, an elongated oval earpiece slot at top and a navigation/button area below (Vodafone D527,379; LG D534,143/D546,313; Palm D548,732). The "continuous front surface surrounded by trim, with the display/earpiece/button visually subordinated" motif — the heart of D593,087 — is exactly the union of these two conventions.

(2) Differences between the prior art and the claimed design. Measured "as a whole" from the standpoint of an ordinary designer:

• Corner radius / proportions of the rectangular front face (D593,087's faces are notably shallow-radius and roughly 2:1 in the front-perspective views; cf. the 115 × 61 × 11.6 mm iPhone versus 98.8 × 54 × 12 mm for the Prada).
• The near-monolithic, uninterrupted front face — in D593,087 the earpiece slot and the button are visually minor interruptions in an otherwise continuous surface, with no keypad, no scroll wheel bezel, and no visible seam.
• The peripheral trim / bezel enclosing the continuous front surface.
• Very thin side profile (Figs. 7–8, 15–16, etc.).

(3) Level of ordinary skill. A designer who designs handheld consumer electronics — someone conversant with both the media-player and phone/PDA front-face vocabularies and with the 2006–2007 industry move toward eliminating mechanical keypads. Under LKQ, this person's "experience, creativity, and common sense," and "the demands of the market," are expressly part of the motivation analysis.

(4) Secondary considerations. (Patentee-favorable, and material.) Enormous commercial success of the iPhone; industry praise; and the 2007–2008 wave of superficially similar slab phones (LG Prada, Samsung F700, Samsung F490, Meizu M8) that the patent's own NPL citation set documents — evidence of copying. Opponents will attack nexus and will argue the Prada preceded the iPhone announcement, so the resemblance reflects a shared industry trend rather than copying of D593,087.

5. Obviousness combinations and motivations

Combination A — the strongest case (principally against Embodiments 2, 4, 6)

Primary: USD504,889 S (Apple, "Electronic device," issued May 10, 2005) or Apple's Oct. 2004 U2 iPod publication — a slab-type handheld with a large, flat, continuous front face and rounded corners.
Secondary: LG KE850 "Prada" (iF-award publication Sept. 2006 / Dec. 2006 announcement) and/or Philips S900 (Jun. 2006) and Tinnos PDA (May 2006) — each showing a front face dominated by a single large display area with minimal surrounding bezel and no mechanical keypad.

Motivation (non-hindsight): same field of endeavor; both reference sets are front faces of pocketable, battery-powered, display-driven handheld devices; the 2006–2007 industry trend toward "concealed keypad" capacitive touch fronts is documented contemporaneously in the art itself (the iF award description: "streamlined display with 'concealed' keypad … clearly differentiates itself from all other existing products"). An ordinary designer seeking to modernize a slab media device into a convergent communicator had an explicit, art-based reason to move the display to the dominant front-face element. Residual differences (corner radius, proportions, thin side profile, trim) are the kind of minor dimensional/proportional choices LKQ treats as reachable by a designer of ordinary skill absent evidence they change the overall visual impression.

Combination B — against Embodiments 1, 3, 5 (the oval- and circle-only embodiments)

Primary: USD548,732 S1 (Palm, "Front panel of a housing for a portable computing device," § 102(e) as of Apr. 22, 2005), or USD505,950 (Tapwave) / USD528,542 (Dell) as handheld front panels.
Secondary: the elongated oval earpiece slot from the cellular-phone art — USD527,379 (Vodafone), USD534,143 / USD546,313 / USD556,211; and the circular button from the media-player art — Apple's U2 iPod (Oct. 2004), USD532,791 (Samsung MP3 player), USD528,561 (Creative), USD489,731 (Tatung).

Motivation: these are the canonical, ubiquitous ornamental solutions within the very same field for the same functional front-face requirements (audio output at the top; a discrete actuation target at the bottom). Where a feature is commonplace in the relevant field and the references are of the same type of article, the mere similarity of appearance supplies the suggestion to apply — the LKQ-era articulation of what In re Borden's "so related" requirement used to police. Because the references are all handheld device front faces, the analogous-art prong is satisfied for every reference without a case-by-case fight.

Combination C — near-anticipation via the Prada (if the Sept. 2006 publication is proved)

If the Sept. 2006 iF award publication or the Dec. 12, 2006 announcement is established as a printed publication before the invention date, the KE850 can be run as the sole primary reference. Its front face — "dominated by a large touch-screen display and little else," black, "glossy black and metal texture deco," 12 mm thick — comes close to D593,087's overall visual impression. Under LKQ the primary reference need not be "basically the same," so even appreciable differences (Prada: 3-inch 240×400 display, no home button, different corner treatment and proportions) do not end the inquiry; the remaining differences become the "factor two" comparison. Under the ordinary-observer anticipation test, the Prada alone would likely still fall short — making this an obviousness, not anticipation, theory.

Combination D — a "design-trend / common-sense" theory

Under LKQ, prior art need not be limited to patents. The industry-custom evidence already in the file — the Wired/MacWorld/Gizmodo/NY Daily News coverage of Feb. 2007 describing the F700 as "an obvious answer to the iPhone's full screen design," and the contemporaneous observation that touchscreen-front phones "are starting to look like the next big thing" (MacWorld, Feb. 7, 2007) — supports the proposition that by early 2007 the large-display, minimal-bezel, single-button front face was the recognized design direction of the field. That is precisely the "market demands and industry customs" evidence LKQ and the May 22, 2024 USPTO memorandum direct examiners to weigh. Caveat: most of this coverage post-dates Jan. 5, 2007; it evidences the state of the field as of that date, not a publication before it.

6. Where the § 103 case is weak (and the patentee's answer)

1. Disclaimers cut both ways. Because the display rectangle, earpiece oval and button are each broken (unclaimed) in three of six embodiments, the enforceable subject matter for Embodiments 1, 2, and 3 is largely the front surface, trim and corner treatment only. That is broad — easier to read onto prior art — but it is also close to the purely functional/ornamental residue of any rectangular handheld slab, which invites the patentee's functionality argument (the ground on which Samsung failed at JMOL in 2012).
2. The side profile is under-considered in every combination above. D593,087's thin, tapering side views (Figs. 7–8, 15–16, 23–24, 31–32, 39–40, 47–48) are solid-line subject matter that the cited media-player/PDA art may not match. A complete § 103 case must address the side views, not only the front faces.
3. Date fragility. The three most visually probative references (Prada Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007, Meizu M8 Jan. 29, 2007, Samsung F700 Feb. 8, 2007) sit at or after the Jan. 5, 2007 priority date. The entire theory depends on either (a) establishing a Sept. 2006 iF-award publication for the Prada, or (b) showing the invention post-dates Jan. 5, 2007 — difficult, since that date is the parent's filing date.
4. The priority-date ambiguity previously flagged (2007-01-05 as the "prior art date" versus 2006-09-11 appearing against the parent in the family table) must be resolved first: if 2006-09-11 were the effective date, the Prada, Philips S900, Tinnos PDA and FM35 references shift from § 102(a) to § 102(b)-adjacent status, and the whole calculus tightens further in the challenger's favor.
5. Secondary considerations remain the patentee's best defense, subject to nexus.

7. Bottom line

• For Embodiments 2, 4, and 6 (rectangular display region claimed), the best combination is A: an Apple slab-type handheld design patent/publication as primary reference (USD504,889 S, § 102(b), or the Oct. 2004 U2 iPod publication) in view of the LG KE850 Prada / Philips S900 / Tinnos PDA front faces, with motivation supplied by the same field of endeavor and the contemporaneously documented 2006–2007 migration to keypad-free, display-dominant fronts. Under LKQ's flexible standard, this is a genuinely arguable prima facie case — one that could not have been run under Rosen–Durling.
• For Embodiments 1, 3, and 5, the best combination is B: a handheld front-panel primary reference (USD548,732 S, § 102(e)) plus the ubiquitous oval earpiece and circular-button features drawn from same-field phone and media-player references. This is the weakest of the theories because the claimed subject matter is close to the functional minimum of the field, but the ubiquity cuts against nonobviousness.
• Most likely outcome on the present record: the § 103 case is not a slam dunk, principally because of (i) the date fragility of the three most-similar references, (ii) the unaddressed side-profile geometry, and (iii) strong secondary considerations — but it is substantially stronger today than the 2012–2015 record reflects, and D593,087's May 26, 2023 expiry does not bar a Top Glory-style post-LKQ challenge.
• To convert this into a defensible opinion, the following must be obtained: the drawing sheets of D593,087 and of each Group 1/Group 2 reference; proof of the Sept. 2006 iF Design Award publication of the KE850; the resolution of the 2006-09-11 versus 2007-01-05 priority question; and the prosecution histories of the cited Apple applications to confirm the § 103(c) common-ownership exclusion.

Primary sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/USD593087/en (specification, citations, family); LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Tech. Operations LLC, 102 F.4th 1280 (Fed. Cir. 2024) (en banc); Dynamite Marketing, Inc. v. The WowLine, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2025); Top Glory Trading Group Inc. v. Cole Haan LLC (Director, 2026); USPTO Memorandum, "Updated Guidance on Evaluating Obviousness in Design Patent Applications and Design Patents" (May 22, 2024); In re Rosen, 673 F.2d 388 (CCPA 1982); Durling v. Spectrum Furniture Co., 101 F.3d 100 (Fed. Cir. 1996); In re Borden, 90 F.3d 1570 (Fed. Cir. 1996); Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966); LG Prada; gsmarena KE850/iF; New Atlas Prada/LG launch; Samsung SGH-F700; MacWorld, Feb. 7, 2007.