In the “that’s so funny I forgot to laugh” category, Gizmodo’s Brian Lam has played a practical joke on the blogosphere. Last week, Lam promised that the iPhone would be announced this week, sparking all kinds of chattering among the top bloggers, which leaked into the traditional press even.
The problem is that the iPhone Lam referred to is not the long-rumored, possibly market-shifting device that Apple is said to be developing, which combines all the cool features of an iPod with mobile voice capabilities. It’s a phone made by Cisco’s Linksys division that connects to a wireless router. It’s actually two phones, one called the iPhone Dual-Mode Internet Telephony Kit for Skype (CIT400) and the other WIP300, the iPhone Wireless-G Phone for Skype.
Ha ha ha — get it. It’s an iPhone, but not from Apple. It retails for $179.99 and it does pretty much the same thing as Netgear’s Skype phone, so far as I can tell, except Cisco has a mobile phone add-on. Moreover, Cisco is riding the wave of Skype’s announcement last week of a $39.99/year unlimited Skype Out service for North American calling.
The Linksys phone looks more like a regular cordless phone than Netgear’s model does, but the style factor doesn’t reach the level of what Apple can do, as Om points out in this seriously flawed analogy.
At least from design perspective, the Linksys phones are like George Clooney, while Apple’s iPhone would certainly be Cary Grant.
(I say seriously flawed because Om is obviously no judge of what appeals to today’s thinking woman. He seems to imply that George Clooney is a pale imitation of Cary Grant, but for so many of us, Clooney is in his own category. Intelligent, socially responsible, handsome in a masculine way but with a classic sense of style…but here I digress.)
Brian Lam himself likens the Cisco iPhone to those phoney Bruce Lee films (Bruce Le, Bruce Li) that came out after the iconic Kung Fu master died, with Cisco looking to fake out consumers by riding on Apple’s “i” phenomenon.
Fans would hear the name, glance at the spelling, see the false idols, and move on. How can anything live up to the name?
But really, it’s just another VoIP handset that Cisco has added to its product line that keeps Linksys competitive. No big deal. Maybe a tiny bit of exploitation on Cisco’s part by playing up its apparently trademarked iPhone moniker, but that’s about it.
Now everyone can go back to the rampant speculation about if and when Apple will release its voice-enabled iPod (we can no longer, of course, say Apple’s iPhone.)
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:12 AM|Comments(1)
I owned an I Phone with the dial up comnnection back in the day. I was working on a Yellow pages product for RR Donnelley and they wanted to tie yellow pages ads to proximity by the phone. That was in 1997.
I just threw the thing out. It was pretty cool. It had a touch screen, a small full QWERTY keyboard that popped out the bottom, great speakerphone, but dial up. And .....dial.. up...is ... so... 90's...
I would post a picture, but I don't think I can. Email me for one...
Posted by: Identitystuff at December 18, 2006 10:45 AM
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