The Mitsubishi Trium Mondo released in 2001 was a PDA-style cellular telephone clearly in the slate form factor now effectively claimed by Apple.

No, he doesnt. He really hates litigation.

This is what he says. It's the same way Bezos at Amazon says he hates patents, including his own 1-Click.

Actions speak louder than words.

Then they should have come up with something original on their own.

Like Apple did?

Indeed. It can be refactored as follows:
Depression::Somatization.

Patent wars between companies are because of the patent & court system problems

I agree with you there. However...

I'm not worried yet that this lawsuit will cause any serious problems down the line.

I don't know., If Apple win this then it could be a reprise of the mid-to-late 1980s, when it was busy suing basically everyone who wanted to bring out a WIMP interface. Apple sued and won against Digital Research's GEM claiming that, among a whole host of WIMP objects, Apple owned the right to even basic stuff such text centered below an icon (you know, the way people had been making labels for centuries). Apple's aggressiveness was one of the reasons for UIs (such as NewWave and GEOS) continuing to remain much uglier and clunkier than they needed to far too long. Apple's obvious goal here is to cause Android manufacturers to uglify their phones for the next several years.

comparison of phones/tablets available prior to the iPhone/iPad and those that came out after both were unveiled

You've seen something like this smartphone timeline, right?

Wiki says the Prada won the iF award in 2007.

There's a lot of wikis out there. Wikipedia English says this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_PRADA#iPhone_controversy

Woo-Young Kwak, head of LG Mobile Handset R&D Center, said at a press conference, “We consider that Apple copied the Prada phone after the design was unveiled when it was presented in the iF Design Award and won the prize in September 2006.”

It's difficult to ignore the abrupt physical design changes that came after the iPhone release.

The iPhone's slate form factor was the culmination of a trend in high-end mobile phones that had been brewing for the previous 7 years and ironically only in 2006 did a combination of SoCs, lower-power screens, commercially feasible augmented glass and higher-density polymer batteries come together. This is what that process looked like. Technology moves in clades.

I don't think it received an award in 2005

The LG Prada won the i-F award in Autumn 2006 (it had been submitted as a demo to a bunch of trade and design fairs through that summer). That's why I put "2006" on this timeline.

In 2006, there was a convergence in cheaper displays, better mobile processors and better batteries that you can three companies who had the same design.

Yes:
The Moral Case Against Apple In One Picture

Time and again, though, Schilling emerged from meetings like this one thinking he’d hit a home run. “There was never a single one that he didn’t walk out of saying he absolutely killed it,” says a former employee who attended a number of investor meetings. But over and over, there was no investment. Still, Schilling remained optimistic.

You couldn't wish for a more textbook example of narcissism-derived Dunning–Kruger bias.

Yeah, this article's assumptions about pricing already seem like some quaint notions around three years out of date. These higher-res monitors are now appearing in retail:

EQ276W 27" LED Monitor

If the US lowered their tax rate to be roughly equal with the jurisdictions companies are allowed to shift profits to, they would have no reason to shift those profits.

That's a nice idea in theory, but in practice the only tax rate any corporation is happy with is basically zero. Take Google in Ireland for example. Ireland's corporate tax rate is 12.5%. But Google doesn't want to pay that. So it uses the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich to dodge several billions owed, bringing Google's effective tax rate down to 2.4% (ie, only ~20% of the theoretical value). You really think that if the US lowered its above-the-line corporate tax rate to 12.5%, mega-corporations such as Apple wouldn't still be trying to think of ways to get out of paying the full rate?

Needs a re-install every year is part of "just works"

My ten-year-old XP install, still running happily on its original MB and cloned to several VMs, just works.

It still has the most effective military on the planet.

An effective military is one that achieves political goals. By this standard, the US military has failed. It has not created a stable, democratic and unitary Iraqi State. It has not created "pacified" Afghanistan and enforced central authority.

It's possible that the most "effective" military is one that does not actually have to be used, but where the appearance of potential strength dissuades enemies from implementing action. In the late-1990s, and before the Bush II-era adventures into the Middle East and near-Asia, there was a lot of posturing about how a newer, leaner US military could intervene at relatively low financial cost using dramatically lower force numbers to implement rapid and enduring alterations in international balances of power and within States. The reality of the stalemate/withdrawal from Iraq and the escalating spread of the Afghan brushfire conflict into neighbouring States despite very high financial, materiel and troop costs has significantly weakened the global perception of the US military. Just as the Soviet military was considered quite effective *before* its Afghan quagmire...