This is the weirdest bug I have ever encountered, and after posting this blog entry, I’m going to be reporting it to Xerox as I’m sure they will be interested to find a resolution to restore their brand name.
A colleague in the office at Vocera has an iPhone 3GS running the iOS 4 update. In our office we have a Xerox Phaser 6115MFP device which I recommended for our needs – Being a former Xerox employee, I think the brand was an obvious move on my part.
Viewing the PDF in Outlook 2010 on his desktop, the PDF is still named its original Xerox Phaser 6115MFP_100323144219.pdf and attempting to forward the email in Outlook doesn’t reproduce the issue in the iPhone which means that this is an iPhone only issue.
We don’t even own a Konica Minolta device at our company, so this could not be a case of misjudgement looking at the wrong email. Furthermore, you can see in the in the picture of his phone that I snagged, the subject of the email is From 6115MFP and other tale tale signs that the email came from a Xerox device.
Back on the PC, I reviewed the properties of the PDF and I haven’t been able to find any evidence of Konica Minolta in the properties. I would not have been surprised is Xerox licensed some technology from them for the scanner in the Phaser 6115MFP possibly giving a clue as to where some kind of metadata could be originating but that’s just not the case here it would seem.
What’s more, we can reproduce this issue to our surprise. If I scan a new document from the Phaser 6115 MFP to him and he attempts to forward the email he can see the filename change before his (and my own) very eyes.
We tested with some non-Xerox PDF’s such as a Word 2010 generated PDF and the problem doesn’t plague them.
Is this some kind of corporate warfare taking place on the iPhone with Konica Minolta trying to win customers through passive advertising? There has to be something strange going on here for the iPhone to rename PDF’s coming from a Xerox device to the name of a direct competitor?