Microsoft is all-in on Surface and it could also be all-in on an all-in-one PC. And it could be in on a conspiracy to hide the name of this product from the public before it releases it — funny, huh?

But at least one trademark ninja — well, The Trademark Ninja — has decided to connect the dots to find out what a Slovenian technology firm has to do with this week’s Microsoft hardware event.

To make things simple, Microsoft has been coming to a law firm in Slovenia for help in protecting a lot of its terms in the country for the past few decades. That law firm apparently owns a subsidiary company that was recently set up and it immediately filed for trademark protection to the terms “Surface Studio,” “Surface Dial” and “Dial” as applied to a vast range of products and product aspects such as “computer hardware,” “telephones,” and “multifunction electronic display devices, measuring and uploading information to the Internet, including the time, date, heart rate […] temperature, wind speed […] activity level, sleep hours” and more.

To the best of our knowledge, Microsoft is not litigating against the company for its use of the umbrella term, “Surface,” used to describe computers, computer mice, mobile computers and a few other product categories — and Microsoft, like any reputable conglomerate, actively protects its terms. In fact, it recently added a bunch more product categories to its protective umbrella for “Surface,” such as “multifunctional electronic devices for displaying, measuring and uploading to the internet information including time, date, heart rate, [etc.]”.

All of this is a longwinded way to say that the Surface Studio may be the market name for the all-in-one computer that Microsoft may introduce on Wednesday while the “Dial” product or products may refer to a peripheral for the device and not necessarily a phone in itself.

We had to shoot down Surface Phone hope. Sorry.

Source: The Trademark Ninja
Via: Windows Central