Oh, how we’ve waited and waited, so long, for the perpetually rumored “iPhone” product from Apple. Only to read yesterday that Apple doesn’t even own the damn trademark! What a cruel hoax. Turns out it’s been owned since 2000 by Cisco, after they acquired IngoGear. [Though, for some strange reason, Apple does own the www.iPhone.org domain, which takes you to a MacBook page. What’s with that? Is Steve Jobs going weird in his old age?]

Well, anyway, you all know how into design Cisco is….[that was a joke]. Please try to stifle your oohs and aahs, friends, but here are the new models, in all their glory, as introed yesterday by the Linksys unit of Cisco:

Linksysiphones_1

Read more of the gory details here, here and here.

These things don’t even look like they come from the same company, let alone the same product family. I thought they hired some wiz-bang new senior VP of something or other there at Cisco who was gonna drag them kicking and screaming into the wonderful, design-conscious world of consumer tech products? And this is what we get? Steve Jobs must be laughing his ass off….

Bad design, bad marketing, ho-hum introduction. All attached to a name that everyone’s just been hanging on, waiting, to hear big, big things about.

Another marketing misfire. Two in one day. They’re everywhere, people….

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