Phone or telephone is purely generic.
If you trademark
iPhone for exactly that...a trademarded brand or service (letter "i" being understood as "internet") followed by the word phone, then you can trademark that brand or concept.
Cisco happens to own the rights to the TM
iPhone since 2000, I think. Cisco also launched their own VOiP service "
iPhone" three weeks before Apple came out with their new product, the
iPhone.
This was a real bonehead move. Apple probably wanted to keep their R&D so secretive and the launch under wraps that they weren't even paying attention to what was going on around them in the industry.
All of this may play out to be rather interesting. There is a web site
www.iphone.com. The WHOIS information is DOMAIN BY PROXY which means private listing. I certainly say I can not blame them. The curious thing is this domain name has been registered since 1995, well before Cisco and Apple came along with name
iPhone. Unless, this is the company that Cisco bought out in 2000 to gain the rights of the trademark and the use for
iphone, although this particular site in its present state has been online since 2003. Plus, they offer Linksys routers, not Cisco, with their products (although Linksys my be made by Cisco but rebranded).
The current site is from what I can see selling a service. This would most likely fall under the SM (Service Mark) category rather than a TM (Trade Mark) category. My guess is no matter what, they would probably unwillingly get dragged into this mess.
Regardless, this Cisco/Apple thing may be a real slugfest.
