I am sorry Swordmaker because I assume you will disagree, but patenting a rectangle with rounded corners has got to be one of the most insane examples ever of the extreme abuse of our patent system. Our patent system is broken. That is not what Apple did. You obviously do not understand Design patents. . . but the strange thing is that the Appellate court invalidated the Design patents for ornamentation which included that description and adopted Samsung's argument that these rounded corners and rectangle shape were indeed "Functional" and then ruled they were part of Apple's UTILITY PATENT because they facilitated the functions of the phone in that they made it easier to put into a pocket, hold the phone, etc. READ the ruling. I provided a link. They go into quite a bit of detail about their ruling. All Apple wanted to do was to protect the overall look and feel of their unique design of the iPhone. . . which was unique for the time as you can see from this graphic of phones before and after iPhone's introduction. There was a sea change in phone design.
You can deny all you want, but you are denying from ignorance of the purpose of Design patents. The Court of Appeals in this instance is frankly right. Read about the differences between a Design patent and a Utility patent and you might start to get an inkling of why you are talking about something you don't at all understand.
I notice you didn't include pictures of my PPC-6700 which came out several years before the iPhone.
http://www.bargainpda.com/assets/4228.jpg>
That is strange, it has a rectangular shape with rounded corners, which was part of Apple's case. The PPC-6700 had many features included in the iPhone and a couple that were not. The technology was older so it had a slide-out keyboard with a resistive screen. The PPC-6700 was not the only phone that was released before the iPhone iPhone that was rectangular with rounded corners. If you re going to exclude pictures of these phones the picture you provided seems more than a little disingenuous.
As far as what Apple did and their intent... that is somewhat open to debate as arguments in the lawsuit demonstrated amply. Here is a link to a an article that seems a little ironic given the arguments made in the trial and which demonstrates Apples desire to manipulate the patent system.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rectangle-with-rounded-corners
Apple's lawyers act like goons hired by the largest corporation in the world to intimidate other technology companies. They do this with farcical patents that would not be approved for any party were the system not hopelessly corrupt.