iPhone update...

Here are the latest whispers from Planet Apple...

1. Cisco may have lost the iPhone brand. The trademark protection times out after a while if you're not using it, and Cisco didn't have anything called an iPhone on the market during a critical period. It did submit a cardboard box with an iPhone sticker on it to the trademark registrar, but on such tactics are laywers fed.

2. The processor IS an ARM. Or a Power PC. Nobody's saying Intel, not even Intel. FBR Research, as reported in EE Times, is saying Samsung won the processor business. Samsung does ARM-based SoC (System on a Chip) circuits, but also has a Power licence. And Apple's job listings include a requirement for someone who knows OSX and ARM. Looks more like a port than a mystery Intel chip - but nobody who knows for sure is saying anything on the record.

3. A criminal investigation has been started into Apple's stock options, most definitely including the world-record grant that Jobs got. The wters here are murky indeed, with falsified meetings, option exchanges, resignations and sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I'll just note that other companies (including ourselves) have lost CEOs for infractions that didn't trigger criminal investigations, and that if I were a betting man I'd not be putting money on Stephen being on stage for the iPhone 2. I hope I'm wrong.

Haven't had this much fun since the frenzied days of 8-bit micros...