In a bit of news from the “hmm, unexpected” department, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has officially denied Apple a trademark for the company’s iPad Mini tablet.

Before you go secreting away your iPad Mini under the thought that that Apple will have to rename its smaller tablet and that you might have a collector’s item on your hands – you and the millions of others that purchased said tablet – know that Apple still has the right to reply to the denial of its trademark application and correct the issues that said reviewers have found.

Specifically, the primary issue for Apple’s rejection is that the iPad Mini mark, “merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant’s good,” states the rejection letter recently discovered by the website Patently Apple(Opens in a new window). The USPTO bases its decision on a consideration of the separate “components” of the device’s name – specifically, “I,” “pad,” and “mini.”

“In this case, both the individual components and the composite result are descriptive of applicant’s goods and do not create a unique, incongruous, or non-descriptive meaning in relation to the goods being small handheld mobile devices comprising tablet computers capable of providing internet access. Therefore, the mark is merely descriptive of a feature or characteristic of the goods and registration is refused under Section 2(e)(1) of the Trademark Act,” the letter reads.

In other words, Apple has to show the USPTO that “mini” is somehow a distinctive name. Otherwise, Apple’s forbidden to, “claim exclusive rights to terms or designs that others may need to use to describe or show their goods or services in the marketplace.”

Additionally, the USPTO reviewer appeared to find fault with Apple’s submission of its iPad Mini product website page as a “specimen” for the trademark, as it “fails to include a picture or a sufficient textual description of the goods in sufficiently close proximity to the necessary ordering information/a weblink for ordering the goods.”

Which is to say, the USPTO reviewer likens it more to advertising, which cannot be used, “to show trademark use in connection with goods.” Apple will have to submit a substitute specimen, “showing the mark in use in commerce for each class of goods specified in the application.”

As mentioned, while the rejection letter was recently uncovered by Patently Apple, the letter itself was sent to Apple in late January of this year. And you can bet that between then, and now, Apple’s lawyers have been hard at work to build a stronger case for the iPad Mini’s trademark.