A Product Named iPAD

Will the real iPad please stand up?

You might have heard the story about several shops in China hurrying to pull Apple iPADs off their shelves. It seems there is some dispute over who owns the name iPAD, and what the owner is allowed to do with it. 

An article in China Daily is running the headline 'Proview says it will sue Apple'. It states there is a dispute over the iPAD trademark, and Proview would like to sue Apple for as much as two billion US dollars.

Both Apple and Proview need to get their stories straight, because it looks like the Apple version is the fourth iteration of a product named iPAD while Proview is the second.

The first, as far as I know, was an item developed to run on BeOS, as reported way back in 1999 by Scot Hacker on his birdhouse.org website.

The second version was produced by Proview International Holdings and launched in 2000. It was described in a press release on the AMD website as 'iPAD, a simple and intuitive means of accessing the Internet without the cost and complexity often associated with personal computers'.

Next came the Fujitsu iPAD, a small handheld device introduced in 2002. Interestingly, Apple acknowledged the existence of this version, buying the trademark rights from Fujitsu for an estimated four million US dollars in 2010 - the same year the fourth version, the Apple iPad, was launched.

 

Image Attribution: Be Inc.Proview International Holdings Limited, Fujitsu Limited, Apple Inc. Phil Hawkins-ijargon

 So, those are the four iPADs, of which the second and the fourth are fighting over trademark rights. That makes sense.