Naming Karma Strikes iPhone

Here is what I sent out to our members just after SteveJ’s iPhone announcement:

Steve Jobs made his iPhone announcement at last, and the design looks like a winner. FiRe attendees will recall Sol Trujillo’s demands for a One Button Phone: Steve just did his best to deliver it. The phone is a black glass front, one Home button, thin, polished stainless back, candy bar format. It includes a high end camera, plenty of storage, and the usual (video) iPod innards.

I’ll write more about this phone in the newsletter tomorrow, but we’ve all been waiting for this event for a long time, and I thought you had best be aware now: this design looks like a hit to me. The stock is up 8%+ on the morning MacWorld news, including a new Apple TV wireless settop device.

The company faces copyright issues over the name, which Jobs appears to have ignored going onstage (?); Cisco, the name owner with an existing iPhone product in the marketplace, assumes (according to Net reports) that final legal demands sent over to Apple last night are thereby accepted. Well, I reckon they are.

Brilliant minimalist design combined with big screen and tight integration of mp3, phone, video, and web tools, makes this phone an Instant Winner.

One problem: it won’t ship till June, giving competitors plenty of time to play catchup.

Nice work, Steve. Can I have one?

—

As of an hour or so ago, News.com posted the lawsuit filed by Cisco over the iPhone name. Oops, Steve. Now that’s a real mistake:

https://news.com.com/2061-10806_3-6149216.html?part=rss&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&subj=news

For a guy who pays a lot of attention to the smallest detail, this is pretty sloppy. Get ready for Apple Records to file next, against the company name change.