Some procedural observations:
1. The rejection was signed by a primary examiner (i.e., someone who has been at the USPTO for awhile and not a rookie) and was approved by a supervisory primary examiner who oversees reexamination proceedings.
2. The rejection is not final (see the unchecked box b near the top of the first page), therefore Apple can and will try to get the examiner to withdraw the rejection.
3. The rejection states that the next "Office action" is expected to be final. I would guess that unless Apple can make a compelling case for patentability OR amend claim 19 --- the only claim at issue in the Apple v. Samsung lawsuit --- to get around the prior-art rejection, the rejection of claim 19 will be made final.
4. If the examiner does make the rejection of claim 19 final, Apple can appeal to a three-person board of senior USPTO officials, nearly all of whom will be long-time patent examiners. If the board affirms the rejection, Apple can appeal to the courts.
5. On the merits, it's helpful to think of claim 19 as an infringement checklist: For that claim to be infringed, every element recited in that claim must be present in the accused product or process [1].
(Infringement analysis treats each patent claim as a multi-part AND statement [2]; the statement must return TRUE for infringement to exist.)
6. Claim 19 was rejected as being "anticipated." This means that in the examiner's view, every single element of claim 19 can be found in a single prior-art reference --- in this case a patent publication by Lira, and, separately, a patent issued to Ording --- and therefore the claim is unpatentable under 35 USC 102 [3].
(If claim 19 is thought of as an AND statement, then in the examiner's view, the AND statement returns TRUE when applied to the Lira reference, and also when applied to the Ording patent [4], and therefore claim 19 is unpatentable.)
7. Perhaps importantly, the examiner's rejections over Lira and Ording were made under subsection (b) of 35 USC 102; that is, the "effective dates" of these two prior-art references were more than one year before the effective filing date of the Apple patent in question. This means that Apple won't be able to try to "swear behind" the references, that is, prove that its invention was invented before the effective dates of the Lira and Ording references [5].
NOTES:
[1] Infringement of a claim can exist even if one or more claim elements are not literally present, as long as the accused product or process has a substantial equivalent of the missing element(s). Note: The doctrine of equivalents is tricky to assert, to prove, and to defend against. See generally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_equivalents.
[2] See generally http://www.oncontracts.com/how-patent-claims-work-a-variety-...
[3] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/102.
[4] See generally http://www.oncontracts.com/patent-validity-the-claims-and-st...
[5] See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s715.html --- scroll down to part II.A.