A week before the expected launch of the much-rumored "iPad Mini," Apple has been granted the design patent for the original iPad. Filed a day before the initial announcement in 2010, the patent references older patents going back to the 1940s and lists Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive among the inventors. As our sister site Engadget says, it gives Apple one more tool in its ongoing patent litigation against Samsung and other companies.

Other iPad-related patents have been approved by the USPTO, including an unused one that has an extra USB slot for connections in landscape mode.