wetab Crunchgear (among other places) reports that Neofonie, the German company manufacturing the Android tablet WePad, has abruptly changed the device’s name to “WeTab”.

The company is being scrupulous not to mention or even imply that a certain fruitily-named Cupertino company had anything to do with its decision—its official statement says:

To clearly differentiate our products within the international market for tablet computers, as of today we have changed the product name of our tablet computer from WePad to WeTab. Similarly, the company formerly known as WePad GmbH will now trade under WeTab GmbH. This change only concerns the name of the product and company. All other particulars and pre-orders are not affected.

Still, given how similar the name of the device was to the iPad’s—only off by one pronoun—it seems pretty obvious that they didn’t just change the name because they felt like it. Apple has been known to get fairly zealous in “protecting” the names of its devices—ironic given the source of its own company name and the baggage that came with that choice.

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