iPhone Announced...And It's Not What You Think

After several years of speculation and rumor and a few days of intense blog-world activity, chatter over the mystical iPhone has reached an almost epic level.

And now it has finally been announced.

It's not what you think.

Our pals at Gizmodo have the scoop. It's neither an Apple product nor a cell phone, but a VoIP phone from, of all people, Linksys. What's the deal? Turns out Linksys (a division of Cisco) owns a trademark on the iPhone name. It has since 1996: Here's the trademark filing, if you don't believe me. Now it's trotting its old product name out once again, for obvious reasons. (Here's Linksys's press release.)

So what does this mean? Hard to say. Apple is widely rumored to be finally announcing its own iPhone (iPod + cell phone) come January, but there has never really been any chatter over the name. "iPhone" has always seemed the obvious choice, and insiders have largely confirmed that that is indeed the name.

Trademarks have to be used in the marketplace in order to maintain their legal status or else they are invalidated, so for Linksys this may be nothing more than a way to make a quick buck by keeping the name it owns alive and claiming, quite legally, that any Apple product to come along later would be infringing on its trademark. If Apple were to release a product called iPhone, Linksys could simply sue Apple (and easily win, though that would take years) or simply arrange a transfer of the trademark to Apple for a hefty fee.

Hence, a product announcement on December 18, one week until Christmas, not a time traditionally well known for big vendor releases and news.

I imagine Internet chatter is going to be bananas over this issue for the next few weeks, as pundits wonder what Apple's next move might be: Specifically, whether it might drop the iPhone name altogether and go with something else (MacPhone? PhonePod? iPod plus Cellular Calling Plan?).

As for the Linksys iPhone, well, I'll be surprised if anyone really cares much about it. Heck, I'll be surprised it it actually arrives on the market for real. This is legal bait, pure and simple.

Gentlemen, start your lawyers!