iPhone Roundup: True Cost, 3D, and Ringtones!

For the sake of not bombarding you with 25 iPhone stories today (too late?), here's a summary of all the goodness we've found in the last 48 hours.

First off, someone took all the images on the Apple site and modelled it up into a 3D gif. Neat, eh?

But how much will you really pay for the iPhone in the first year? Counting the $640 for the phone ($599 + tax), a $60 voice plan, a $40 data plan, and $8 worth of fees, you're looking at $1,936 in just the first year. Yikes. Then again, you're paying around that much if you get a regular smartphone with the same data plans, but this may be a shock to the "average" consumer who isn't used to getting data.

Think you're going to be getting the entire 4GB or 8GB on your iPhone for music and videos? Think again. Apple's going to be using 500MB of that to store the OS (slimmed down version of OSX), so you're only going to be getting 3.5GB or 7.5GB. Even less if you're considering the apps that are installed there—if the apps aren't considered part of the OS.

Also, more importantly, users won't be able to use iTunes songs as ringtones. At least, not at launch. We're sure Apple's gotta work out stuff with Cingular and the music industry, since using songs you already bought as ringtones makes it pretty hard to justify buying the same song again just to use as a ringtone—something that's turning out to be a pretty big money source for both providers and the music industry.

And has Cisco lost the rights to the iPhone? According to a trademark law expert, Cisco had to file a Declaration of Use for the trademark before the sixth anniversary of the registration date. Since they registered on 11/16/99, the sixth anniversary would have been 11/16/05. Since they didn't do so, they may in fact have lost their right for exclusive use of the iPhone trademark. – Jason Chen

True cost of the iPhone - CenterNetworks does the math! [CenterNetworks]

iPhone 3d [iPhone-3d]

Macwelt gets more iPhone details out of Apple [Ars Technica]

Cisco lost rights to iPhone trademark last year, experts say [ZDNet]