The Wirelessinfo Blog

When Steven Jobs announced the new iPhone during MacWorld, the Linksys team at Cisco was anything but happy.  A lawsuit was soon filed in which Cisco claimed rights to the trademark dating from an acquisition in 2000.   This week, the two parties have announced a resolution to the conflict in the form of an agreement that allows both of them to use the iPhone trademark.   It was also announced that they will explore interoperability in the areas of consumer communications and security.   

At the time the lawsuit was announced, there was considerable speculation that Cisco was using it as leverage to get a bigger piece of the action with both iPhone and iTV.   Although no business terms were released by either party, we can expect future joint announcements with good news for the consumer markets.

[http://www.apple.com/iphone/]

 Some WiFi hot spot companies are banking on the fact that many mobile customers use their wireless service mostly within a 100 mile radius of their homes, and don’t care about roaming or country-wide service. VoIP over WiFi is less expensive, and suits the needs of these customers well. 

The biggest issue these phones have traditionally faced is battery life and talk time – but Marvell has a new chipset that provides much more of both talk time and standby time – over 5 hours talk time and over 80 hours standby time. New generations of phones are in the works that will take advantage of this chipset – such as the one by ipDialog, Inc in Sunnyvale, CA.   Motorola was ahead of the game by announcing a nice clamshell phone in 2004, and we expect many more traditional phone OEMS to enter this market in the coming months. 

With better battery life, we bet this technology will take off – but dual mode phones will still require a traditional mobile service provider.  With the expansion of hot spots, traditional cellular carriers will definitely lose air time revenue unless they add new lucrative services to their bag of tricks - or move into mobile WiFi.