Odds and Ends

A Cell Phone By Any Other Name…

March, 22nd - 5:48 pm ET | posted by Brian in Odds and Ends

Cell phones are known by many names. Are you using the proper name? Am I? Here are just some of the variations I’ve run across in my time at Wirefly:

Phone - If you call your cell phone a phone are you old school or just ahead of the curve? Everyone knows wired phones are going away so perhaps there is no need to distinguish and a phone is once again just a phone.

Cellular Phone - Used to sound high tech and cutting edge but lately it sounds more and more old fashioned and clearly not high tech. Plus, GSM carriers don’t like being referred to as “cellular”.

Wireless or Wireless Phone - Probably puts you out ahead of the folks saying “cellular phone,” but not by much and everything is wireless these days so it just does not have much edge to it any more.

The one that shows your age and always make me laugh is Car Phone - it used to make you a player if you could work that into a sentence, or even had one, but now it is truly comical. Don’t even get me started on “Bag Phone.” That was always a silly name.

“Mobile phone,” or simply “Mobile,” used to be more for the fashion forward euro crowd but may now be a good modern day replacement for cell phone or wireless phone. “Mobile” sounds good, does it not? “Camera phone” was hot for a while, but now allmost all of the phones have a camera - funny that few camera’s have phones.

If you don’t work for Garmin you don’t expect GPS phone to catch on any time soon. How about PDA? Should we all start using “PDA” - no! Personal Digital Assistant? Ugh.

The manufactuters like RIM and Palm and HTC certainly love that many people call their wireless device by its brand name “my Blackberry”, my “Sidekick” or “Palm” and I am sure glad they dropped the “pilot” from Palm! The RAZR name was big but seems to have faded lately.

Will we all be confused if we don’t standardize this? Do we need to decide soon? No, I think we will be just fine and it will just work itself out like when we all learned to surf the world wide web on our personal computers - right?