On Tuesday, January 9th Apple announced iPhone. Everyone went crazy. All of the top tech blogs were posting about it and Digg was having stories appear at an alarming rate. If you were involved in a tech job I’m sure coworkers didn’t stop talking about it and would ask anyone else new into the area if they heard the news.

Apple iPhone seems innovative and is the new must have for all tech enthusiasts — who use cell phones — personally I’m not too found of cell phones and have never owned one, maybe one day but for now I’m fine without it.

Being a Mac site I felt I had to post on this. Yes I’m here for the switchers but news like this is hard to pass up.

But let’s rewind to just under a month before Apple’s announcement. Cisco announced its iPhone on December 18th, 2006. This iPhone launced as not a single phone but as a complete VoIP phone lineup. Speculation then arose that maybe Cisco tried selling the name to Apple and talks fell through so now Cisco was capitalizing on the name recognition — and why not. Heck I’m capitalizing on the I’m A Mac slogan or trying to anyway.

But jump ahead to January 9th again. Mention of Cisco’s iPhone disappeared, everyone forgot about it as they were in awe of the new capabilities of Apple’s new iPhone. But Cisco didn’t forget.

It seems that Apple and Cisco were still in negotiations for the name. Which brings up two scenarios, one being a theory provided by myself and the other what is currently happen.

My theory.

We’ll assume Cisco announce their iPhone line up with full intentions of selling the name to Apple. Now maybe they were trying to make a quick buck in the short time before Apple released their phone and before all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. Maybe they were hoping that Apple would announce their iPhone and people not knowing the difference would buy Cisco’s iPhone’s sitting on the shelf (sure they could return them but what if they liked them? — it’s a theory let’s pretend for a bit here).

Also what if Apple suggested that Cisco put out a line of phones with the iPhone brand assuming that the proper paper work would be complete before Apple’s announcement. This would get most people off of the Apple iPhone trail and make for a bigger surprise announcement when Jobs announced the iPhone at MacWorld.

Once again, this is all speculation and theory.

Moving on to what is currently happening. Cisco filed a law suit against Apple the very next day for infringing on its iPhone trademark. Now news has broke that Cisco’s own trade mark may be in jeopardy. The Economic Times has a nice write up of the current situation (Cisco’s trademark issues) as well as stating that Apple may alter the name of the phone to Apple Phone. The Register also lends its online space to a story regarding the trade mark in the US.

In any scenario the next few months should be interesting in regards to who will hold the iPhone trade mark. If Apple loses the battle it will be interesting to see if they go with the simple Apple Phone or come up with another “i” brand.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 11:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.