The Apple iPhone It is!

Bad news for anyone who revels in epic corporate tussles: Apple and Cisco, who were squabbling over the name "iPhone"--already in use on Cisco VoIP phones and planned for a certain upcoming Apple product--are apparently friends again. MacNN is reporting that the two companies have struck a deal that will allow them both to use the name on their respective products. (Here's the official word from Apple, which vaguely says that the companies will also talk about working together on topics such as security.)

With that out of the way, we can all go back to the important questions--like whether $499 and up is an awful lot to pay for a phone that involves a two-year contract and which doesn't sport the high-speed data access that anyone who wants to use the Internet on the go is going to want before 2009 rolls around...

I have another question, though--one we'll probably never get an answer to. Namely: Did Apple panic enough to come up with one or more backup names, just in case Cisco prevailed in court? Mr. Jobs's company is so good at coming up with iconic names for iconic products--"iPhone" already feels synonymous with "cool phone"--that having to backtrack and give the phone a new name woulda been a big deal.

Some obvious candidates:

iPod Phone: My esteemed Macworld colleague Jason Snell thought that this might be the name that Apple's phone would actually get. (Based on the theory--reasonable but ultimately wrong--that Apple wouldn't use a name that another large company seemed to have a trademark on.) Looking back, iPod Phone would have been too music-centric a name, considering that the iPhone's Internet-related features turned out to be so ambitious.

MacPhone: Woulda been surprisingly accurate given that the iPhone runs some sort of variant--the details are still murky--of the Mac's OS X. Would also have been a nonstarter, most likely, since it might have confused Windows users into thinking that the phone wouldn't work with their OS. And might have had trademark problems of its own.

Apple Phone: OK, this might have worked. It would have been accurate. It would also have had a nice parallelism with Apple TV. I'll hazard a guess that if Apple considered any of the likely contenders for a new iPhone name, it was this one. But I'm just as willing to accept the notion that the company was so confident of victory that it didn't assess its options. Or that it had a name up its sleeve that was as out of left field as "iPod" sounded back in 2001.

Oh, and I'm guessing that the chances that it pondered the name NewtonPhone are exactly zero...

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