Well I took a ride back in the Time Machine to 1996,and guess what I found? An ad for the iPhone not from Apple….
The ad was in the Sep 96 edition of Asian Computer Sources. So it seems from this and the fact that Vocaltec, Jeff Pulver and others all used the term iPhone back in 1995-6, that we are talking about a generic term and not a trademark!
(if you look in the ad - you can see twice the term iphone in red)

5 responses so far ↓
1 iPhone advertisement, circa 1996 -- Alec Saunders .LOG // Jan 22, 2007 at 5:25 am
[...] The battle over the iPhone trademark promises to be messy, to say the least. Flat Planet Phone Company CEO Moshe Maier dropped me a quick note this morning to tell me to have a look at his blog, where he has posted a scan of a 1996 magazine advertisement showing an internet phone named iPhone. Sure enough, you can see the name iPhone quite clearly on something which looks a lot like one of today’s USB handsets for Skype. [...]
2 See This 1996 iPhone Ad: Not Cisco’s OR Apple’s | Apple iPhone Review // Apr 21, 2007 at 10:19 am
[...] Moshe Maeir dug up this ad from a September 1996 issue of Asian Computer Sources. [...]
3 i-Phone bestaat al sinds 1996 | iPhoneclub.nl // Apr 22, 2007 at 6:26 am
[...] eerste telefoons. Weliswaar met streepje, maar dat mag de pret niet drukken. Moshe Maeir vond deze advertentie in het septembernummer van Asian Computer Sources uit 1996. (0) | | | Print | [...]
4 VoIP Monitor // Apr 30, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Todays VoIP Blog News
5 » Hey look! Here’s an iPhone ad from, uh, 1996!! | IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband | ZDNet.com // May 22, 2007 at 5:39 pm
[...] Moshe dug up, scanned and posted a 1996 advert for an “iPhone.” This ad is from some outfit called the Tranbon Electronic [...]
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