Calling modern cellphones "phones" is like when old Star Trek called their little plastic data slabs "tapes".

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Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me...

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Computing, Computing...beep boop sqeeek, computation compleat: this is not a tape.

Undearius

Portable Handheld Omnidirectional Networking Equipment is also pretty long, we could probably shorten it.

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In German, a phone is called a "Handy"

mechoman444

No it's not... Because we know what a cellphone is.

In star trek they called it tapes because they didn't know what they would be called in the future.

Moreover, it's called a cellphone as a colloquial term. They're correct nomenclature is "smartphone".

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To me, I've always associated the PDA with devices w/o the phone capability, pre-smartphones. Those existed. Looked similar to modern smartphones, just bulkier and with less capability. That's been the distinction for me.

Frankly, the only other word for (cell)phone or mobile has been smartphone. I don't think we have a better word for them yet (pocket computer just doesn't grab you).

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In America, a handjob is called a "Handy"

darkstar

We could make that an acronym!

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To jump on with this, sometime in TV, especially with sports broadcasts or recaps, I still hear hosts say something like, “let’s go to the videotape” even though basically no one is using tape anymore for these things.

Glimpythegoblin

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jago

You're going to play "moreover", and "nomenclature" then fuck up a "they're/their"?
Hang your head.

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This guy phones.

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Germans call it a handy.

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In Germany, they employ the whole person, not just the hand!

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It's worse than that, 'nomenclature' isn't just a fancy synonym of "name". It refers to a system for naming things, rather than a quality or characteristic of the thing being named. So, even if they'd written 'their' it wouldn't really make sense (and 'they're' is just gibberish).

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I always liked mobile it works for everything you do on the go

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Is it worse that I still call them "telephones"?

p.s. I am British, which gives me some allowance for using strange, historical words.

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I always liked the German "Handy" ... cos it's great for porn.

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I called mine Marvin.

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To pull terms from a couple different sci-fi book series I like, we could go for Hand Terminals or Scribs. I like both, the former when I'm being grandiose and the latter when I'm feeling cute.