Thursday, February 19, 2009

Stupid Naming Conventions: Cell Phones

Today, cell phones can do everything from snap pictures to play music, go on the web, and even open and edit business documents. They have full keyboards that swivel, flip, and slide open in every way imaginable. To make these new phones even more appealing to teens, college kids, and hipsters, cell phone manufacturers began giving their phones names.

Just look at the Razr, the Rokr, the Chocolate, the Shine, the Instinct, the Secret, the BlackJack, the Scoop, the Cookie, the Lotus, the Renown, the Behold, the Saga, and the ubiquitous BlackBerry. This is a trend that's really, REALLY fucking stupid and I wish it would stop before it gets even more out of hand. These names are almost as generic and inane as colognes and fragrances at the mall.

How could you ever tell someone that you got a new phone called "the Chocolate" and not feel stupid and embarrassed? What a dumb name for a phone! What a dumb name for anything other than a bar of chocolate! I'm just waiting for them to come out with a phone called "the Cliche." Better yet, the perfect phone for me would be called "the Critic," if only it made fun of all the other phones with stupid names. I would rather have a phone with an esoteric naming system like "A-100" than a retarded name dreamed up by some marketing executive.

Phone manufacturers: stop naming phones after random nouns in the dictionary. Seriously.

I am not the only one who feels this way:

 http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/05/the-futurist-where-all-these-cell-phone-names-are-taking-us/
 http://betanews.com/2009/02/04/does-a-cell-phone-s-name-spell-its-success/
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS131854+03-Feb-2009+BW20090203
https://web.archive.org/web/20081208211128/http://blog.gsmliberty.net/cell-phone-musings/cell-phone-names-gone-wrong/