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

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dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

It's slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.

Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges "tapes." It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest with understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It's a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.

The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. It's possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I'm not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it's worth, I do know a few oldsters who call the various small card based flash media formats "memory chips," which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their "isolinear chips," whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.

Anyway, we do have a limited selection of "phones" without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being "pocket media players," which turns into the rather non-melodious "PMP." (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants "pocket internet media players," and therefore have the opportunity to label these "PIMPs," which is obviously much cooler.)

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upvoted for all the work you put into that, but you could have just said "technically not true".

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My dad once told me of, IIRC, a Sprint ad wherein the then-president of Sprint came on screen and said something like "you know, with all the things these can do now, it's a wonder we still call them phones." I never saw the ad myself, but it seems to be saying something similar to what you are saying.

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My grandmother said the same when I showed her a Motorola Droid in 2009. She said "that's a pocket computer".

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What do you call your phone? By its brand?

ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed

"Pocket-Sized Portable Computer with Telecommunicative Radio Capability" is quite a long name, people would just get tired of saying that and call it by a simpler name.

Oh wait.

madthumbs

PSPC w/ TRC lol

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We should have immediately called "smartphones" padds.

SolacefromSilence

I call mine by where it's made, as I do my Davenport.

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It should have been PDAs. For some reason that just didn't catch on.

dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

all the work

You have, like, seen my post history, right?

dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

They didn't catch on because in the era they existed it was very difficult to achieve any kind of connectivity with them to the outside world. By the time that was able to be ubiquitous, smartphones were already happening.

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Is the term "Pocket PC" still trademarked? Let's start calling them that.

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Maybe since you can do your entire Job on it we can call it a hand Job

Or perhaps since we have it in our fane all day we can call it a facial.

Or since we watch so much porn on it we can call it a video player.

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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".