IPad the tech is a pretty good idea. But there is more to a successful product than just tech. You have to have clarity of purpose and clear ownership of the intellectual space even if the item is a shared social device. The iPhone was clearly a winner on both those scores. But the iPad, not so much –
A Chinese company is claiming that its iPad knockoff is in fact an original design that has been copied by Apple. The P88 has been on the market in China for six months. It’s easy to recognize: it looks just like a big iPhone.
Xiaolong Wu, the president of the Shenzhen Great Loong Brother company which makes the P88, gave an interview to Spanish national newspaper El Mundo. If the iPad comes to China, he says, “We won’t have any choice but to report them,” because “it will certainly affect our sales.” The charge? Oddly, El Mundo reports the crime as “plagiarism”, although we assume it means IP or copyright infringement.
Wu says that Apple has not only copied the concept of a multi-touch tablet, but also the design of the case and screen bezel. And pre-empting our obvious criticism, that the P88 is just a large-scale iPhone or iPod Touch rip-off, Wu says that “they have nothing to do with it, as they have completely different functions.”
And the second…
While Apple’s iPad stole all of the headlines last week, the company has been in a dispute with Fujitsu over the name since last September and it doesn’t look like the Japanese manufacturer is going to step down.
“It’s our understanding that the name is ours,” said Mashario Yamane, director of PR at Fujitsu, in an interview with the New York Times.
Fujitsu has been selling its own iPad, a £1,500 Windows CE point-of-sale device used in retail stores, since 2002 so you’d think it is well within its right to claim ownership of the name.
There’s more to it than meets the eye though, as Fujitsu didn’t apply for the iPad trademark until 2003, specifically covering handheld devices used in retail. However, the application was bogged down and eventually listed as “abandoned” in April 2009 because a company called Mag-Tek had already claimed the trademark rights to IPAD for its line of PIN-entry keypads.
Now in the latter case, it is probably not too big an issue, except that the actual ownership might be in doubt. As a consequence it might take quite a while and $$ to not only clear it up but also pay royalties to the proper party. It just does not help and induces delay.
The first instance is more relevant. Should Shenzhen make its case before the Chinese courts (and why would they lose, they are the home team) it could lock Apple out of a very large market segment. It might also cause problems for Apple with overseas suppliers. So this is the item to watch.
The piece that confuses me highly is Apple is a brand conscious business entity. They prey on that identity to maintain the margains they garner for their product. So why would they launch a new product line without having researched the relevant branding issues with the name? Eh??
P88
IPAD
Filed under Apple, new technology by Dr. Dog