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Apple’s legal challenge to Love Labs, a partnership in which I am a, er, partner, over an animation on the iBuzz Web site has been well documented by Web sites as diverse as ZDNet and Wired’s Sex Drive Daily. And the Prufrock column in the Business Section of the Sunday Times. There’s also been a media furore recently over Apple’s iPhone, a product that is going to revolutionise the way we use the phone (it says there). So imagine my surprise, shock, horror and delight when, direct from China, this hit my desk…

First off, I will swear, hand on heart or any other bodily part you’d like to threaten to chop off if I’m lying, I had absolutely no idea that the Chinese factory was intending release a product called “iPhone Vibe”. We certainly had no plans to start selling a product called that.

But if we were out to deliberately aggravate Apple, that would be the best way to do it. But we’re not, so we weren’t planning to.

Behind the scenes, the story of the iPhone Vibe’s development provides an interesting insight into how sex toy manufacturers in China operate…

The iPhone Vibe comes from the same factory that made the original iBuzz back in 2005. This was the product that Love Labs launched in the US on Steve Jobs’s birthday last year. The unit we sent to him in Cupertino was returned by Apple. Sob.

As it happens, iBuzz was made in the the same factory that makes the OhMiBod music-activated vibrator, which has been available since October(ish) 2006. OhMiBod uses the same technology as iBuzz, but isn’t as good as…

iBuzz Two, which lets you plug in 2 sets of headphones straight into the unit, without the need for a clunky Y-adaptor. Needless to say, the same factory that made iBuzz and OhMiBod also made the clever parts of iBuzz Two which went on sale in December 2006.

But wait, there’s more history.

And, as it further happens, it’s the same factory that originally made the VibraExciter Mobile Phone Activated Vibrator, which is triggered off when your cell phone receives a call or a text message. VibraExciter has been available since (I think) late 2004.

The same phone-activated vibrator technology has appeared more recently (Summer-ish 2006) in the Good Vibrations Reach Out Mobile Phone Butterfly Vibrator. Look not-especially-closely and you’ll see a remarkable similarity between VibraExciter and the Reach Out unit. No prizes for guessing where that’s made.

And just as the music-activated vibrating gadgetry appeared in iBuzz then OhMiBod, the phone-activated wizardry that first appeared in VibraExciter is now going to be in Boditalk, a product that the OhMiBod people were showing off at AVN Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. It’s been mentioned in despatches and Neal had a quick fondle of one at AVN, but pictures are hard to find at the mo so I can’t show you what it looks like.

Except I can. Because the iPhone Vibe that arrived this week, Neal tells me, is Boditalk by any other name… Looks all right, doesn’t it?

I can see how Our Man in the East has put all his elements into a mixer and come up with the iPhone Vibe. Take the “i” prefix from the iBuzzes that he’s been making, blend with some of the mobile phone goodness he’s been putting out, simmer on gas mark 5 for 30 minutes and hey presto!

iPhone Vibe. (With iPod for scale.)

But where did he really come up with the name? Is he trying to piggy-back on Apple’s iPhone? Might he have seen Apple’s iPhone promo blurb and named it after that? Possibly. Probably even. I don’t know, hard to say. I haven’t asked him, but I will.

He certainly would have had these units in production long before Steve Jobs launched the Apple iPhone in front of the World’s Least Critical Audience at the MacWorld fanboy love-in in San Francisco earlier this month. In fact, Neal’s just told me he’s had variations of it crossing his desk for about 3 months, but I don’t know when the name was picked.

And I don’t know how popular Apple is in his bit of China, so iPhone may not have even crossed his radar. Certainly it would be arrogant of Apple to assume that *everyone* in the world has heard of iPhone. And it would be bizarre to assume that *anyone* has heard of Cisco’s iPhone.

Maybe Apple’s lawyers will have a pop at him. Or Cisco’s. Maybe they’ll take turns!

But anyway, apart from providing an insight into the workings of a Chinese sex toy factory, the existence of a produt called the iPhone Vibrator leaves us with the dilemma of whether to sell it or not.

To put it mildly, Apple is already irritated with Love Labs over that animation. And even though we had done nothing wrong, and we’ve had nothing to do with the development of the iPhone Vibrator there are huge “Proceed with Caution” signs all over the place when it comes to anything vaguely Apple-related.

It doesn’t take an expert to work out how annoyed they’d be if we started selling a product called iPhone Vibrator - to coin a Chris Morris phrase, they’d leave us quadraspazed on a life glug…

Get your iPhone Vibrator here.