InfoGear iPhone

» see infogear.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The first product called an iPhone was a kitchen telephone. It sat on a counter, it had a handset on the side of it, and where a dial pad would normally end there was a seven inch grayscale touchscreen with a QWERTY keyboard that slid out from underneath. You could call someone on it. You could also read your email on it, or open a web page over the same phone line, badly and slowly, at a time when doing that at all in a room without a computer was not an ordinary thing.

InfoGear Technology was set up in Redwood City in November 1995 by the venture investor Robert Ackerman, who took the technology and most of the engineering team out of a National Semiconductor internal project. The product was unveiled at CES at the start of 1998 for $499, plus $19.95 a month for the service that made it work. Inside was a 16-bit processor of the sort that was going into fax machines and one megabyte of memory, which tells you what the design constraint was. This was a phone with a browser bolted on, not a computer pretending to be a phone.

Roughly a hundred thousand of them went out over two generations, the second arriving in 1999. Reviews were decent. The theory behind it was that ordinary households wanted the internet without wanting a PC, and that telephone companies would subsidize the hardware the way they later subsidized handsets. Neither half of that came true. The carriers were not interested, and the households that wanted the internet mostly went and bought the PC.

Cisco announced it was buying InfoGear on 16 March 2000 for about $301 million in stock and closed on 5 June. It ran the InfoGear network for a while, stopped making iPhone-branded products in 2001, and then shut the service down. What Cisco actually kept was a registered trademark on the word, which sat in a drawer for five years while nothing was sold under it.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

This was a United States retail product for a United States household, and the distance from Ankara in 1998 is not subtle. A $499 appliance with a monthly subscription on top assumes a family that already has more phone lines than it needs and treats a second internet device as a convenience purchase. In Turkey that year the phone was a single PTT line, the connection was a modem you shared with whoever else was in the house, and the idea of paying a monthly fee for a second slower way to reach the same web would not have survived being said out loud.

So I read about this one rather than remember it. The interesting part from here is not the device but the bet: an entire industry decided around 1998 that the web needed to arrive in the home on something other than a computer. WebTV made it a set-top box and Netpliance sold a terminal below cost hoping to make the money back on the service. 3Com built the Audrey for the kitchen counter, which is where this one was supposed to go too. Every one of them was reasoning from the same premise and every one of them was wrong in the same way.

~ the name ~

InfoGear registered the iPhone trademark and Cisco inherited it in 2000. At the end of 2006 Cisco moved it onto a line of Linksys VoIP handsets, which looks tidy in hindsight and was probably about keeping a registration alive. Apple announced its own iPhone on 9 January 2007. Cisco sued the next day. They settled in February with both companies allowed to use the word, plus some vague language about exploring interoperability that never turned into anything anyone can point at.

Nine years separate the two products. What they share is a name and a fairly literal reading of what happens when you put the internet inside a telephone. Everything that made the second one work was missing in 1998. There was no cellular data worth the name, and no processor that could run a real browser inside a phone's power budget.

~ the funny part ~

Ackerman's own summary of the failure is the whole obit in one line. They were early into the marketplace, and ten years later it was a very different story. That is what everyone says about a product that missed, and in this case it happens to be exactly, measurably true. The device did the right thing at a moment when every component it needed was a decade from being good enough.

~ what it became ~

Nothing directly. Cisco absorbed InfoGear's engineering into its consumer division and the appliance line ended. The lineage that matters runs through the trademark rather than the technology, which is a strange way for a product to be remembered and better than being forgotten.

There is a small collectors' market for these now, mostly driven by the name on the front. A device that sold a hundred thousand units and got discontinued in 2001 would normally be landfill. This one is on auction sites because of a lawsuit that happened six years after it stopped being manufactured.

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