Update – January 4, 2009: Owen Fletcher at IDG News Service has the scoop on the iPhone Trademark issue. As expecrted, it has been resolved amicably. Apple will continue to legally use the iPhone name in China. There have been no details released on the naming rights resolution. It’s possible that money changed hands or some other partnership quid-pro-quo. Apple and Hanwang have done business in the past (e.g. Hangwang Chinese handwriting recognition on iPhone) and may have additional cooperation plans. Read more via > Computerworld
June 11, 2009: China Trademark: iPhone by any other name would not be a trademark issue. But there is a small problem to resolve to China. Despite Apple filing for the “iPhone” trademark in China in October 2002, the registration application specified “computer software” and “computer hardware” but it did not cover phones. So here comes Hanwang Technologies in May of 2004 … Yep, they grabed the iPhone name and filed the trademark for handsets. Hoping this can be resolved soon (could already be) and that it won’t cost Apple too many Yuan.
Apple and Hanwang can play nice together and they already have. We had previously heard that Apple was working on Chinese handwriting recognition for iPhone 3.0. Last year (May 2008) we learned that Apple bought rights to the technology for a specialized iPhone character recognition application from Hanwang. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but this technology was demoed during the 2009 WWDC Keynote, albeit for Macs. But we’re confident it will be available on the soon to be official iPhone in China.
More on Hanwang and Apple > HERE
