Image: Linksys
Remember a year ago, when the iPhone was announced? No, not Apple’s iPhone, the VoIP product line from Cisco’s Linksys product line! Though Cisco enjoyed a lot of press after Steve Jobs gave Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch wonderphone the same name, but then the other iPhone sort of vanished. What’s happened since?
Not much, actually. As our colleague Rob Beschizza reports for Wired News, the Linksys iPhone is selling OK, and the company plans to roll out new models under the name. But the name iPhone is Apple’s. No one, not even the most contrarian anti-Apple antagonists, thinks of seamless VoIP calls when they hear the name.
But a year on, Apple has its iPhone and Cisco has its iPhone, and no one confuses one with the other. And everybody’s happy with that, as Cisco spokesperson Karen Sohl says:
Relations with Apple, Sohl said, are good. “There’s no bad blood,” she said. “We enjoy working with Apple.”
Whatever Happened to the Other iPhone? [Wired News]
Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete’s particular Apple avocations are both around design–interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!
2 responses to “One Year Later, Cisco’s iPhone Co-Exists With Apple’s”
Weird. A bunch of us must have been thinking the exact same thing within the span of a week.