I wrote yesterday (because I took my time to digest the Macworld announcements, and I almost ended up posting it after the news came out) that, since Apple had committed to using the iPhone name now before they had finalized their licensing agreement, Cisco might as well tell them to get lost and multiply their bill by three.

Well, someone definitely told the other to fuck off, but it’s a bit unclear who struck first:

Apple spokesman Steve Dowling called the Cisco lawsuit “silly,” adding there are several companies using the term iPhone for VOIP products, and Cisco’s trademark is “tenuous at best.” “We’re the first company to ever use the iPhone name for a cellphone,” he said. “If Cisco wants to challenge us on it, we’re very confident we’ll prevail.”

According to Engadget, Cisco didn’t want money, but Apple’s iPhone to be compatible with their iPhone VoIP platform. And, from their point of view, it makes complete sense — but they should have known better than to actually expect Steve Jobs to go along with that.

I’m pretty sure that Apple was just stalling the negotiations so that Cisco wouldn’t go around announcing “Steve Jobs tried to license the iPhone name and failed” before last Tuesday.

iPhone Not Intel:

Could Apple be hush-hush about the chips because they’re using the iPhone as a relationship-starter with AMD?

Or maybe they just don’t want people to know how underpowered the CPU is?

John Gruber: Apple Job Listing for iPhone Software Engineer Mentions ARM Experience.

iPhone & LG KE850: separated at birth?

It’s always so funny when two companies design the exact same product, and you just know one is doing it right and the other will somehow have gotten it wrong.

Steve’s devices:

Gates wants to sell platforms. Jobs just wants to make tools.

Jobs, in fact, couldn’t possibly be more out of touch with today’s Web 2.0 ethos, which is all about grand platforms, open systems, egalitarianism, and the erasing of the boundary between producer and consumer. […] In Jobs’s world, users are users, creators are creators, and never the twain shall meet.

In other words, there’s a distinct possibility that the iPhone may remain locked, refusing third-party applications forever. Although, if it’s really based on OS X in any tangible capacity, it couldn’t be that hard to inject some homebrew code into the system — without having to reboot the phone into Linux, I mean.

iPhone Countdown Widget.

iPhone release date countdown.

iPhone Widget.

iPhone Release Countdown Widget.