12 ms·

“Smartphone” is the wrong name

75 points by loup-vaillant 11y ago

gilgoomesh 11y ago
> "Smartphone" has the wrong connotation. It suggests your expensive brick is a phone first, and can do smart things second. If you look at where the battery goes, that's usually an accurate distinction. If your screen-on time is less than 4 hours per day, you may spend 75% of battery on the cellular antenna. Everything else takes a lower priority. Calling it a phone also efficiently distinguishes between smartphones and tablets or devices like the iPod Touch which are identical devices except for the lack of cellular antenna.
- provemewrong 11y ago
  There are plenty of tablets with cellular antenna though (not all of them have voice call functionality, but that's mostly just a software limitation). And with VoIP and instant messaging apps even WiFi-only device can fulfill "phone" roles.
sschueller 11y ago
Better than what we call them in Switzerland. 'Handy', pronounced the English way.
- pluma 11y ago
  Germany as well. I always heard it dates back to an early marketing thing. There's also the old (~1990s) joke that it's actually Bavarian and short for "Hän die ken Schnür?" ("Haben die kein Kabel?" / "Do these not have a cord?").
- Digit-Al 11y ago
  In some countries, 'handy' has a very different meaning :-o
castell 11y ago
Bill Gates called it the "Wallet PC", back in 1994. Later Pen-based computing. Later "Pocket PC".
- decasteve 11y ago
  Bill's description was pretty spot on too. I read The Road Ahead again recently and he was right about a lot of things. Though even with all that prescience Microsoft still missed the boat a number of things they saw coming a mile away.
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  Pocket PC still sounds nice, but Apple's marketing efforts caused the meaning of the word to become unclear. Pocket computer is perhaps the most neutral term available. For the average consumer this semantic discussion won't change their perception of those devices though. The masses for now have settled on the three categories of smartphone, tablet, and laptop/desktop computer. (Even more frustrating is that every piece of software, service, and website you use on those devices, and in some countries even a text message is called simply app.)
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  By 1994, "PC" had already shifted from being platform neutral to referring to the IBM-compatibles with Microsoft OSs. So a name with "PC" in it wasn't likely to stick as the platform-neutral label for the mobile segment.
agumonkey 11y ago
Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.
- afandian 11y ago
  I have a Blackberry Passport. It has a nice tactile keyboard, play/pause button and volume control. The dream isn't dead (yet).
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    Makes me wanna spend money on BB and do free advertisement for them. That said, Nokia did a few phys.kbd phones not long ago. Bought a C5 for my mom as she just wanted a simple thing. Unfortunately the software layer was one of the worst one I had to experience in my whole life. 4 random and generic submenus on average to get to any function. Ellipsis full menus ... gosh. Anyway, shootout to Blackberry.
- Lanari 11y ago
  This. When smartphone first come up I was like I will wait until they get improved and calling some will get easier just as on my regular phone, years later and calling people and doing regular phone things becoming harder and harder.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    It's very common when tech allows for too much, ideas that seem to make things simpler just make them shinier and potentially harder. Until the next wave of fauxgress comes in to attract the buyers. I consider our whole society a massive form of that, food, health .. it's all a backfire fest.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. Are you kidding me? All of those functions are 10x easier to do on the "unfit touchscreen" that on what we had before that (tiny non-touch screens, LCDs, 80's style arrays of buttons, etc). And when it comes to actually taking the picture, changing track or volume etc, smartphones even offer physical buttons on the sides. Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera?
icebraining 11y ago
I agree that naming is important, yet I don't think calling them "palmtops" would have changed anything. Tablets were and often are still called "tablet computers", yet they usually have the same limitations.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  True. On the other hand, the name make it a bit easier to protest: they can't say those things are not computers, since can't do anything else. Alas, we often just say "tablet", so it's still possible to make an artificial distinction between them and "real" computers such as laptops and desktops. The idea behind "palmtop" is to appeal to the intuitions behind laptops and desktops, and suggest it should be subjected to the same rules (when possible).
  - astrocat 11y ago
    I can't be the only one who has made a habit of casually referring to them as "space computers." Whenever my wife asks some easily google-able question I reply "well just ask you pocket space computer." I want to hang on to the sense of awe and amazement at the reality of having a powerful computer and all of the internet at our disposal at all times.
joakleaf 11y ago
"Smartphone" is the wrong name? What about "Feature phone"? Edit: Actually, I meant that the term "Feature phone" is really even a worse name for feature phones, than "Smartphone" is for smartphones. I didn't suggest that it was a better name, but the downvote and comments suggest that I didn't make that clear.
- squilliam 11y ago
  'feature phone' is already an industry term for (mainly) bottom-tier Android phones that lack the hardware to be considered among 'smart phones' but have the basic abilities to access the internet, and play basic media files. Basically the phones that come with the pay-as-you-go wal-mart phone plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - castell 11y ago
    Nokia's Symbian based phones, various China based look-a-like phones and WinPhone 7 were called "feature phone". You couldn't do much beyond the basic functionality. And there was a very limited amount of apps available, if any at all. They were as cheap as today's entry level Android smartphones.
wodenokoto 11y ago
Japanese cellphones had a lot of the same use-cases that modern smartphones have. You could buy stuff online, use GPS, surf the mobile web, send pictures via email and purchase stuff and movies (disney even produced direct to featurephone cartoons in Japan!). This is usually used as an argument for why the Japanese decided to colloquially shorten 携帯電話 ("keitai denwa", hand-held telephone) into just 携帯(hand-held, or handy) instead of just calling it 電話(phone) like so many western countries do or 携電("kei-den"), which follows a more typical pattern for abbreviations in Japanese. However, with the success of the iPhone, which was incompatible with all the featurephone services a new segment arose consisting of iPhones and non-backward compatible Android handsets, and these are denoted as "smartphones" shorten to スマホ(sma-pho). I think it is interesting that they chose to move closer towards the "phone" moniker, than staying with the focus on hand-held.
- ccozan 11y ago
  Germans also call their smartphones "handy", even if the name comes from age of bricks/clamshells and having a color screen with 256 colours was a selling point. Same idea, recently, the name "iphone" is quite popular and people distingish it between phones made by Apple and the rest.
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  In that respect, I miss the word 携帯. スマホ (sumaho, ugh!) feels so uncultivated in such a pleasant language. It was a predictable outcome though. Japanese has a tendency to abbreviate common words, and the term smartphone (the unwieldy スマートフォン/sumātofon) was imported with the first generations of smartphones. The German Handy on the other hand (as ccozan mentions)… What a lovely word.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    I only hear people using スマホ to differentiate them from feature phones ガラ携 (Galapagos phone, also a homonym for "junk phone"). 携帯 is still the general term for "cellphone".
    - 11y ago
chroma 11y ago
> For instance, picture Microsoft in 2001, after it got sued for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Imagine what would have happened if they sold Windows XP with an exclusive application store. Imagine that every program must be approved by Microsoft to run on XP, and they take a 30% cut. Oh, and no interpreter allowed. > They would have been sued into oblivion, lost half their customers, suffered one hell of a bad press. They could have sunk. Yet when Apple did exactly that to their new computer, the iPhone, few objected and customers flocked. This just tells me that execution matters more than the initial idea. There's plenty of competition in the mobile space. If users didn't want Apple's locked-down ecosystem, they wouldn't buy iPhones. The vast majority of users don't care about side-loading apps or installing another operating system. They are (quite rationally) willing to sacrifice customization and app choices to avoid malware.
- pjc50 11y ago
  The openness of the PC platform was something of an accident. The home microcomputers and the early Macs had their OS in ROM. There were competing PC operating systems (DR-DOS, DESQview, OS/2, etc) but Microsoft managed to kill off all the commercial competition. But that was all pre-"web 1.0". Once computers started becoming routinely networked, we ended up with the malware problem which has driven us here. The user is in no position to accurately assess the safety of software, so as you say it's not such a bad choice to pick a locked platform to avoid malware. The situation is an uncomfortable duopoly between the semi-open Android and locked-down Apple ecosystems. How long will this remain stable? I don't know.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    > The user is in no position to accurately assess the safety of software Hate to say it, but I think it is much worse: the "average user" is in no position to asses which software he is clicking on. When a pop-up appears, many users don't know if it comes from the browser, another application, the OS, some malware, or if it's a pop up at all (could be a Gif clickbait).
- greggman 11y ago
  Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared. They're they ones that lobbied to have the government declare MS a monopoly. In other words nothing to do with execution and perceived awesomeness by customers. At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it. It was companies that were upset. Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy
robbrown451 11y ago
I doubt anyone is going to change what they call them (other than dropping the "smart" now that such features are becoming the default), but the point about not being able to install apps except though an app store with a monopoly is very true. Of course it tends to be true with tablets as well. Maybe when we start to see more android devices that are in a laptop configuration we'll start to struggle more with that issue.
- jpindar 11y ago
  Why? Are you under the impression that you can't install Android apps except through an app store?
kalleboo 11y ago
In many countries they're mostly referred to as "mobiles" (as an abbreviation of "mobile phone"), especially now that nobody has feature phones anymore and there's no reason to make the distinction. I find it perfectly vague yet easily understandable.
- carlob 11y ago
  In Italy many people refer to mobiles as telefonino (lil' phone). I guess that doesn't really apply to phablets though :)
harryf 11y ago
Microsoft has been exploring the smartphone / laptop gap with Continuum - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-continuum-mobile http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-con...
fit2rule 11y ago
In my opinion, it'd only be a truly smart phone if it shipped with a compiler onboard so you could build apps for it ..
- khedoros 11y ago
  DroidDevelop and AIDE are available on Android devices. As far as I know, no portable devices ship with a compiler installed, but since it's easily available in the app store, I'm not convinced that it matters.
  - jpindar 11y ago
    There's also QPython and, while I haven't tried them, there appear to be various IDES/compilers/interpreters for javascript, BASIC, C++ compilers, Go, etc.
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    OpenPandora, a portable device (which I consider to be an utterly arbitrary class of computing), ships with usable compilers.. Point is, I think its arbitrary that you can't use an iPhone to write apps for the iPhone.
    - khedoros 11y ago
      Right, OpenPandora, its predecessors, and its successors. I considered buying one for a time, but never quite convinced myself, so I've never gotten to play around with one.
s3cur3 11y ago
I prefer "tricorder."
eitally 11y ago
They won't stop carrying the "phone" connotation until the service providers stop pitching themselves as primarily telephony companies.
mikeehun 11y ago
I usually refer those as "tracking device"
- zipwitch 11y ago
  I was thinking more "self-funding prole monitoring device program".
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  Now that's a political statement!
Zigurd 11y ago
Articles like this gloss over how small tweaks to a product put it in a different category, with large commercial consequences. In the case of smartphones, having a mobile network radio is a very large difference in capabilities, price, operating cost and channel. Smartphones are the largest business on the planet and growing, and tablets have stumbled for not having met their potential in displacing enough PCs in office productivity use cases. Smaller distinctions are important within the smartphone and tablet markets, like "phablets" and various size and price categories for tablets, and for not-quite-tablets like "convertibles." Microsoft tried and failed in multiple product generations to turn PCs into tablets, while in Windows CE and NETCF they had the basic formula for a modern smartphone but they treated NETCF like a red headed stepchild. Small differences, big results.
gjm11 11y ago
I have for some time had a crackpot theory that language will actually evolve the other way. We have these things we carry around with us, called "phones"; they are actually general-purpose computing devices and making (what we still call) phone calls is a small part of their purpose. And to an increasing extent these can fulfill almost all our computing needs. So, fast-forward a couple of decades, assuming no huge technological shifts[1]. Everyone is used to having one of these things that they carry around in their pocket, and scarcely anyone really needs any other general-purpose computing device. We still call them "phones" because we always did -- so now this is the usual term for a general-purpose computing device. And, yeah, there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Well, what are you going to call something like a phone but sized to sit on your desk while you work? Obviously it's a desktop phone, right? And somewhere out there In The Cloud there are whole farms of server phones :-). And there will be conversations like the ones we[2] now have about how "computer" used to mean a human being who did calculations. "Hey, did you ever look up where the word 'phone' actually comes from? It turns out that back in the 20th century they mostly used them for talking to one another, and it comes from some Greek thing meaning 'sound at a distance'. Weird, huh?" [1] That's a pretty big assumption, of course. [2] For sufficiently small values of "we".
- api 11y ago
  > there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Unusual needs like being able to see a lot of text at once, type things longer than a paragraph, multitask, use more than one app in a work flow, and run real software? I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Right now to believe that mobile is "the future" of everything requires one to believe that most people have nothing to say beyond one-liners and selfies and that the only purpose of computing is to interact with canned services. That might be true for a subset of the market but I think it's a smaller subset than some do.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Phones already have dockable desktop capability (that is, support for desktop-style output via appropriate cables that support HDMI, and support for desktop-style input via Bluetooth keyboard/mouse.)
justMaku 11y ago
Well, to be honest the best name would be just "PC". Think about it, PC stands for a personal computer. And because a smartphone is in fact a small computer and it's as personal as it gets.
gvurrdon 11y ago
I've long thought that "hand computer" was a good term for it, but that has rather a lot to do with nostalgia: https://app.box.com/s/i6tw2gc8avr9r1hevn0trf4w41nt9r1b https://app.box.com/s/i6tw2gc8avr9r1hevn0trf4w41nt9r1b
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
stillsut 11y ago
The average adult is required to be available by phone. Not by snapchat, not by skype, not even by text message. By. Phone. In tech-land and teen-land you can specify platforms to each of your relationships. But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Without being required to carry around the phone part, a pocket-sized tablet would have 10x less adoption than it does today. "smart phone" it still is.
- thebaer 11y ago
  It doesn't make the point invalid. There are laptops that connect to cell networks. I can make calls to landlines from my desktop. That doesn't change the name, because it does a lot more. I can also use these devices without a SIM card and never make a phone call. The evolution of the device definitely led to the name, but it's clear that that's just another peripheral use, like taking photos, listening to music, or getting turn-by-turn driving directions. If any device had all those capabilties, we'd call it a computer of some kind. You're not going to get the media to use the name "palmtop," but if the tech community adopted it I think we'd do and see things a little differently.
- lfowles 11y ago
  > But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Heh. My eye doctor just confirmed my upcoming appointment via text message. I'm sure they would be calling if anything outside of the most common case needed resolved, however.
- Razengan 11y ago
  Not to mention that you can have multiple accounts on any social network, and switch between them at any time, but you can have only one phone number on that mobile device, whatever you want to call it. So if that device is uniquely identifiable by a phone number, and only you can be the only user of that number at any time (again unlike social network accounts), might as well call it a phone.
  - kruczek 11y ago
talles 11y ago
If I had to rename "Smartphone" I would call it "Personal Computer". My phone is way more "personal" than my desktop and laptop. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with "Smartphone". Two are the reasons: 1 - There's history there. Most of the words aren't precisely crafted by linguists when society needs them, we simply build on what already exists. The so called smartphone came from the cellphone that came from the telephone, the name itself hints you about its origins. It's fascinating what you can learn about a word when you study its etymology. http://etymonline.com http://etymonline.com 2 - Meaning wise I wouldn't worry so much about the connotations that the author mentions (I wouldn't worry at all). I'm with Wittgenstein in this one: the word means whatever we decide it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Meaning_is_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#M...
- punee 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Wittgenstein, while agreeing with your point about meaning being defined by use, would still argue that there's a lot of unspoken confusion that comes from calling the smartphone a smartphone. The first thing I did when opening this thread was Ctrl+F to see if anyone was suggesting it should be called a "personal computer", because that's what I've thought best described what the smartphone really has become. Now, to suggest even trying to use that to refer to smartphones these days would be adding a much heavier does of confusion. But the insight seems fundamentally right to me. Interesting article on the subject that brings up this point: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosystems-and-the-death-of-pcs http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...
radley 11y ago
from the Greek phon: voice, sound i.e. a means to communicate. You do not call an automobile "wheeled combustion chamber".
peter303 11y ago
Note Apple came to this market from a different direction than most other cellphone makers. Their first mobile computer was a revolutionary music player (innovative UI and music store). It evolved into a sophisticated media computer with color video, wireless and computer utilities in the last iTouch before the iPhone. (Apple still ships iTouches which are the iPhone device without the cellular phone in it, or a micro iPad.) So they pretty much had a full fledge mobile computer before grafting phone technology into it.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Their first mobile computer was a revolutionary music player The Newton was not a revolutionary music player, and no Apple music player before the iPhone was a "mobile computer" in a sense that would make this portrayal meaningful and accurate. > It evolved into a sophisticated media computer with color video, wireless and computer utilities in the last iTouch before the iPhone. iPod Touch (sometimes nicknamed "iTouch") was introduced after the iPhone, running a later version of iPhone OS (the OS which later became iOS) than the first iPhone. There was no "iTouch before the iPhone." There was the old-style wheel-controlled iPod before the iPhone, and that was a revolutionary (at least in terms of commercial impact) music player, but it wasn't a "mobile computer" in the same sense as the iPod Touch, modern smartphones, or even earlier PDAs or the Apple Newton.
nullc 11y ago
Handcuff computer was rejected by the marketing department.
OJFord 11y ago
Does anyone actually say "smartphone" except (vanishingly rarely) when necessary to describe the device in contradistinction to "dumbphones"? Is there a difference whether spoken or written? If so, where are you? I'm curious because all I hear in the UK is "phone" or "mobile" - both of which we always used. But I'm acutely aware that I hear or read "cell" in American sources significantly less often than, I think, I used to.
- Kluny 11y ago
  Yeah, "cell" usage is going down and "phone" is going up. Personally, I like to be needlessly formal and call mine a "telephone", and some of my friends are catching that.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  > Does anyone actually say "smartphone" except (vanishingly rarely) when necessary to describe the device in contradistinction to "dumbphones"? True. My beef isn't about "smart" however, it's about "phone". I believe my point stands even more acutely in this light.
  - OJFord 11y ago
    Sure, it was something of a side-point, but the more relevant point (which I may have forgotten to make..) was that in the UK 'mobile' is still common. Although actually a contraction of 'mobile phone', it doesn't have the same 'problem' going forward, since we can just decide or assume that it refers to a mobile computing device. Possibly though things will get even more blurred than that - everything a computing device and almost all of them mobile... Time will tell!
danjayh 11y ago
> Personally, I have more faith in a third alternative: a virtual instruction set. Like bytecode, though not managed like Java, and not meant to be interpreted or JIT compiled either. It could run on the bare metal, or be translated into something that is —like the Mill CPU. That way you can keep the illusion of having a single instruction set, while sacrificing virtually nothing. Moreover, future CPUs don't even need backward compatibility, as long as you can translate (and optimise!) the virtual assembly for them. I don't think he really gets how CPUs work -- it's already that way, and has been for quite a while. The published instruction sets are the 'virtual' instructions, and translation of these instructions (be they ARM, x86, or PowerPC) is baked into each CPU's microcode. We actually have no visibility into the 'real' instructions that CPUs execute ('micro-ops'), because they're proprietary.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  The idea is to own up to this reality, and stop designing instruction sets as if they were meant run directly. x86 in particular has a legacy of simple CPUs that didn't have much of a decoding unit. But now it has gone too far in the other direction: it takes a significant amount of chip surface and energy to decode, making it unsuitable for low power situations. ARM on the other hand is probably lacking in the SIMD department (I haven't checked). We need to go back and overhaul the CPU instruction set like Vulkan, Dx12 and Mantle overhauled the GPU APIs. We need to reflect on what CPUs can do, what they can do fast, and what they can do with low power. Then we need an instruction set that would act as an API to these subsystems. Something orthogonal, that doesn't take too much energy to decode, and could be decoded in parallel if need be (for crazy desktop speed ups). While we're at it, it might be nice to have explicit support for things like pointer tags, to speed up dynamic stuff like garbage collection and runtime type information. You're right, I don't really get how CPUs work. But I did pick up a few things that lead me to trust instruction set design is not over. We can do better.
  - loup-vaillant 11y ago
    When I make a long comment, I like to see explanations about what warranted a downvote. So I can learn…
ask5 11y ago
the device is still a phone, because it needs a SIM card to operate. Without it it's pretty much useless. You cant even start the iphone without it, first thing it needs is a sim card.
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  What? If you boot an iPhone without a SIM it'll show you a warning/error that the SIM is missing, but it still turns on and works.
joe_momma 11y ago
Dude, just give it a minute and they'll be called "tricorders" as they should be.
- Animats 11y ago
  We're getting closer. Caterpillar just announced their C60 smartphone with thermal imaging.[1] [1] http://www.catphones.com/en-us/phones/s60-smartphone http://www.catphones.com/en-us/phones/s60-smartphone
Animats 11y ago
This article is from France. What's the French term? Has the Académie Française decided on one yet? (Unlike English, French has an official standards body.)
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  The most common term here is "portable", or "téléphone portable", or just "téléphone". "Portable" means what you think it means: you can carry it. Sometimes, (especially in the commercials), we see "mobile" instead of "portable". It also means what you think it means: you can move it. I think one reason behind the word "mobile" is because "ordinateur portable" (or "portable" for short) is already used to talk about laptops. Destkops are in rare cases called "ordinateur de bureau". Generally, we just say "PC" —unless it's from Apple. I am not aware of what the Académie Française may or may not have decided. What I love about the English language here, is that we have 3 words that neatly apply to the three form factors: desktop, laptop, and palmtop. It's a bit of a bummer we can't exploit such regularity in French. If I had to settle on a term, I'd probably try "ordinateur mobile", or "mobile" for short. Unlike "palmtop", it wouldn't scream "computer", so the best I can hope for is that we just stop using "téléphone" to describe those things.
jdlyga 11y ago
We call them "buttons" on interface windows because they look and act like mechanical buttons in the real world. But mechanical buttons have that name only because they look like shirt buttons.

75 points by loup-vaillant 11y ago

> "Smartphone" has the wrong connotation. It suggests your expensive brick is a phone first, and can do smart things second. If you look at where the battery goes, that's usually an accurate distinction. If your screen-on time is less than 4 hours per day, you may spend 75% of battery on the cellular antenna. Everything else takes a lower priority. Calling it a phone also efficiently distinguishes between smartphones and tablets or devices like the iPod Touch which are identical devices except for the lack of cellular antenna.

provemewrong 11y ago
There are plenty of tablets with cellular antenna though (not all of them have voice call functionality, but that's mostly just a software limitation). And with VoIP and instant messaging apps even WiFi-only device can fulfill "phone" roles.

sschueller 11y ago

Better than what we call them in Switzerland. 'Handy', pronounced the English way.

pluma 11y ago
Germany as well. I always heard it dates back to an early marketing thing. There's also the old (~1990s) joke that it's actually Bavarian and short for "Hän die ken Schnür?" ("Haben die kein Kabel?" / "Do these not have a cord?").
Digit-Al 11y ago
In some countries, 'handy' has a very different meaning :-o

castell 11y ago

Bill Gates called it the "Wallet PC", back in 1994. Later Pen-based computing. Later "Pocket PC".

decasteve 11y ago
Bill's description was pretty spot on too. I read The Road Ahead again recently and he was right about a lot of things. Though even with all that prescience Microsoft still missed the boat a number of things they saw coming a mile away.
Freak_NL 11y ago
Pocket PC still sounds nice, but Apple's marketing efforts caused the meaning of the word to become unclear. Pocket computer is perhaps the most neutral term available. For the average consumer this semantic discussion won't change their perception of those devices though. The masses for now have settled on the three categories of smartphone, tablet, and laptop/desktop computer. (Even more frustrating is that every piece of software, service, and website you use on those devices, and in some countries even a text message is called simply app.)
dragonwriter 11y ago
By 1994, "PC" had already shifted from being platform neutral to referring to the IBM-compatibles with Microsoft OSs. So a name with "PC" in it wasn't likely to stick as the platform-neutral label for the mobile segment.

agumonkey 11y ago

Not even phones they're not handheld devices anymore. The lack of physical interface is very sad. Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. It's a small slate computer.

afandian 11y ago
I have a Blackberry Passport. It has a nice tactile keyboard, play/pause button and volume control. The dream isn't dead (yet).
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Makes me wanna spend money on BB and do free advertisement for them. That said, Nokia did a few phys.kbd phones not long ago. Bought a C5 for my mom as she just wanted a simple thing. Unfortunately the software layer was one of the worst one I had to experience in my whole life. 4 random and generic submenus on average to get to any function. Ellipsis full menus ... gosh. Anyway, shootout to Blackberry.
Lanari 11y ago
This. When smartphone first come up I was like I will wait until they get improved and calling some will get easier just as on my regular phone, years later and calling people and doing regular phone things becoming harder and harder.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  It's very common when tech allows for too much, ideas that seem to make things simpler just make them shinier and potentially harder. Until the next wave of fauxgress comes in to attract the buyers. I consider our whole society a massive form of that, food, health .. it's all a backfire fest.
coldtea 11y ago
>Taking pictures, listening to music, even calling someone, all require high attention interaction over an unfit touchscreen. Are you kidding me? All of those functions are 10x easier to do on the "unfit touchscreen" that on what we had before that (tiny non-touch screens, LCDs, 80's style arrays of buttons, etc). And when it comes to actually taking the picture, changing track or volume etc, smartphones even offer physical buttons on the sides. Remember trying to get to the 10th track of the 4th folder in your "physical" CD mp3 player or minidisk? Setting anything more advanced than zoom level and picture mode on a typical 2002-2005 compact camera?

icebraining 11y ago

I agree that naming is important, yet I don't think calling them "palmtops" would have changed anything. Tablets were and often are still called "tablet computers", yet they usually have the same limitations.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
True. On the other hand, the name make it a bit easier to protest: they can't say those things are not computers, since can't do anything else. Alas, we often just say "tablet", so it's still possible to make an artificial distinction between them and "real" computers such as laptops and desktops. The idea behind "palmtop" is to appeal to the intuitions behind laptops and desktops, and suggest it should be subjected to the same rules (when possible).
- astrocat 11y ago
  I can't be the only one who has made a habit of casually referring to them as "space computers." Whenever my wife asks some easily google-able question I reply "well just ask you pocket space computer." I want to hang on to the sense of awe and amazement at the reality of having a powerful computer and all of the internet at our disposal at all times.

joakleaf 11y ago

"Smartphone" is the wrong name? What about "Feature phone"? Edit: Actually, I meant that the term "Feature phone" is really even a worse name for feature phones, than "Smartphone" is for smartphones. I didn't suggest that it was a better name, but the downvote and comments suggest that I didn't make that clear.

squilliam 11y ago
'feature phone' is already an industry term for (mainly) bottom-tier Android phones that lack the hardware to be considered among 'smart phones' but have the basic abilities to access the internet, and play basic media files. Basically the phones that come with the pay-as-you-go wal-mart phone plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
- deleted 11y ago
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- castell 11y ago
  Nokia's Symbian based phones, various China based look-a-like phones and WinPhone 7 were called "feature phone". You couldn't do much beyond the basic functionality. And there was a very limited amount of apps available, if any at all. They were as cheap as today's entry level Android smartphones.

wodenokoto 11y ago

Japanese cellphones had a lot of the same use-cases that modern smartphones have. You could buy stuff online, use GPS, surf the mobile web, send pictures via email and purchase stuff and movies (disney even produced direct to featurephone cartoons in Japan!). This is usually used as an argument for why the Japanese decided to colloquially shorten 携帯電話 ("keitai denwa", hand-held telephone) into just 携帯(hand-held, or handy) instead of just calling it 電話(phone) like so many western countries do or 携電("kei-den"), which follows a more typical pattern for abbreviations in Japanese. However, with the success of the iPhone, which was incompatible with all the featurephone services a new segment arose consisting of iPhones and non-backward compatible Android handsets, and these are denoted as "smartphones" shorten to スマホ(sma-pho). I think it is interesting that they chose to move closer towards the "phone" moniker, than staying with the focus on hand-held.

ccozan 11y ago
Germans also call their smartphones "handy", even if the name comes from age of bricks/clamshells and having a color screen with 256 colours was a selling point. Same idea, recently, the name "iphone" is quite popular and people distingish it between phones made by Apple and the rest.
Freak_NL 11y ago
In that respect, I miss the word 携帯. スマホ (sumaho, ugh!) feels so uncultivated in such a pleasant language. It was a predictable outcome though. Japanese has a tendency to abbreviate common words, and the term smartphone (the unwieldy スマートフォン/sumātofon) was imported with the first generations of smartphones. The German Handy on the other hand (as ccozan mentions)… What a lovely word.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  I only hear people using スマホ to differentiate them from feature phones ガラ携 (Galapagos phone, also a homonym for "junk phone"). 携帯 is still the general term for "cellphone".
  - 11y ago

chroma 11y ago

> For instance, picture Microsoft in 2001, after it got sued for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Imagine what would have happened if they sold Windows XP with an exclusive application store. Imagine that every program must be approved by Microsoft to run on XP, and they take a 30% cut. Oh, and no interpreter allowed. > They would have been sued into oblivion, lost half their customers, suffered one hell of a bad press. They could have sunk. Yet when Apple did exactly that to their new computer, the iPhone, few objected and customers flocked. This just tells me that execution matters more than the initial idea. There's plenty of competition in the mobile space. If users didn't want Apple's locked-down ecosystem, they wouldn't buy iPhones. The vast majority of users don't care about side-loading apps or installing another operating system. They are (quite rationally) willing to sacrifice customization and app choices to avoid malware.

pjc50 11y ago
The openness of the PC platform was something of an accident. The home microcomputers and the early Macs had their OS in ROM. There were competing PC operating systems (DR-DOS, DESQview, OS/2, etc) but Microsoft managed to kill off all the commercial competition. But that was all pre-"web 1.0". Once computers started becoming routinely networked, we ended up with the malware problem which has driven us here. The user is in no position to accurately assess the safety of software, so as you say it's not such a bad choice to pick a locked platform to avoid malware. The situation is an uncomfortable duopoly between the semi-open Android and locked-down Apple ecosystems. How long will this remain stable? I don't know.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  > The user is in no position to accurately assess the safety of software Hate to say it, but I think it is much worse: the "average user" is in no position to asses which software he is clicking on. When a pop-up appears, many users don't know if it comes from the browser, another application, the OS, some malware, or if it's a pop up at all (could be a Gif clickbait).
greggman 11y ago
Microsoft was considered to have a monopoly (whether you or I agree). As such they were subject to different rules. Apple, especially when iPhone launched, did not have any kind of monopoly on cellphones nor did they have one on PDAs (which is really where smartphones come from, not cellphones). As for people, people didn't sue Microsoft, companies did. People mostly didn't care. Companies like Sun and Netscape cared. They're they ones that lobbied to have the government declare MS a monopoly. In other words nothing to do with execution and perceived awesomeness by customers. At the time MS was sued IE was the best browser by pretty much every measure so customers wanted it. It was companies that were upset. Also malware infested vs walled garden is a false dichotomy

robbrown451 11y ago

I doubt anyone is going to change what they call them (other than dropping the "smart" now that such features are becoming the default), but the point about not being able to install apps except though an app store with a monopoly is very true. Of course it tends to be true with tablets as well. Maybe when we start to see more android devices that are in a laptop configuration we'll start to struggle more with that issue.

jpindar 11y ago
Why? Are you under the impression that you can't install Android apps except through an app store?

kalleboo 11y ago

In many countries they're mostly referred to as "mobiles" (as an abbreviation of "mobile phone"), especially now that nobody has feature phones anymore and there's no reason to make the distinction. I find it perfectly vague yet easily understandable.

carlob 11y ago
In Italy many people refer to mobiles as telefonino (lil' phone). I guess that doesn't really apply to phablets though :)

harryf 11y ago

Microsoft has been exploring the smartphone / laptop gap with Continuum - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-continuum-mobile http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-con...

fit2rule 11y ago

In my opinion, it'd only be a truly smart phone if it shipped with a compiler onboard so you could build apps for it ..

khedoros 11y ago
DroidDevelop and AIDE are available on Android devices. As far as I know, no portable devices ship with a compiler installed, but since it's easily available in the app store, I'm not convinced that it matters.
- jpindar 11y ago
  There's also QPython and, while I haven't tried them, there appear to be various IDES/compilers/interpreters for javascript, BASIC, C++ compilers, Go, etc.
- fit2rule 11y ago
  OpenPandora, a portable device (which I consider to be an utterly arbitrary class of computing), ships with usable compilers.. Point is, I think its arbitrary that you can't use an iPhone to write apps for the iPhone.
  - khedoros 11y ago
    Right, OpenPandora, its predecessors, and its successors. I considered buying one for a time, but never quite convinced myself, so I've never gotten to play around with one.

s3cur3 11y ago

I prefer "tricorder."

eitally 11y ago

They won't stop carrying the "phone" connotation until the service providers stop pitching themselves as primarily telephony companies.

mikeehun 11y ago

I usually refer those as "tracking device"

zipwitch 11y ago
I was thinking more "self-funding prole monitoring device program".
loup-vaillant 11y ago
Now that's a political statement!

Zigurd 11y ago

Articles like this gloss over how small tweaks to a product put it in a different category, with large commercial consequences. In the case of smartphones, having a mobile network radio is a very large difference in capabilities, price, operating cost and channel. Smartphones are the largest business on the planet and growing, and tablets have stumbled for not having met their potential in displacing enough PCs in office productivity use cases. Smaller distinctions are important within the smartphone and tablet markets, like "phablets" and various size and price categories for tablets, and for not-quite-tablets like "convertibles." Microsoft tried and failed in multiple product generations to turn PCs into tablets, while in Windows CE and NETCF they had the basic formula for a modern smartphone but they treated NETCF like a red headed stepchild. Small differences, big results.

gjm11 11y ago

I have for some time had a crackpot theory that language will actually evolve the other way. We have these things we carry around with us, called "phones"; they are actually general-purpose computing devices and making (what we still call) phone calls is a small part of their purpose. And to an increasing extent these can fulfill almost all our computing needs. So, fast-forward a couple of decades, assuming no huge technological shifts[1]. Everyone is used to having one of these things that they carry around in their pocket, and scarcely anyone really needs any other general-purpose computing device. We still call them "phones" because we always did -- so now this is the usual term for a general-purpose computing device. And, yeah, there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Well, what are you going to call something like a phone but sized to sit on your desk while you work? Obviously it's a desktop phone, right? And somewhere out there In The Cloud there are whole farms of server phones :-). And there will be conversations like the ones we[2] now have about how "computer" used to mean a human being who did calculations. "Hey, did you ever look up where the word 'phone' actually comes from? It turns out that back in the 20th century they mostly used them for talking to one another, and it comes from some Greek thing meaning 'sound at a distance'. Weird, huh?" [1] That's a pretty big assumption, of course. [2] For sufficiently small values of "we".

api 11y ago
> there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Unusual needs like being able to see a lot of text at once, type things longer than a paragraph, multitask, use more than one app in a work flow, and run real software? I doubt it... unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Right now to believe that mobile is "the future" of everything requires one to believe that most people have nothing to say beyond one-liners and selfies and that the only purpose of computing is to interact with canned services. That might be true for a subset of the market but I think it's a smaller subset than some do.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > unless phones develop dockable desktop capability in which case they are now dual-purpose converged devices. Phones already have dockable desktop capability (that is, support for desktop-style output via appropriate cables that support HDMI, and support for desktop-style input via Bluetooth keyboard/mouse.)

justMaku 11y ago

Well, to be honest the best name would be just "PC". Think about it, PC stands for a personal computer. And because a smartphone is in fact a small computer and it's as personal as it gets.

gvurrdon 11y ago

I've long thought that "hand computer" was a good term for it, but that has rather a lot to do with nostalgia: https://app.box.com/s/i6tw2gc8avr9r1hevn0trf4w41nt9r1b https://app.box.com/s/i6tw2gc8avr9r1hevn0trf4w41nt9r1b

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

stillsut 11y ago

The average adult is required to be available by phone. Not by snapchat, not by skype, not even by text message. By. Phone. In tech-land and teen-land you can specify platforms to each of your relationships. But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Without being required to carry around the phone part, a pocket-sized tablet would have 10x less adoption than it does today. "smart phone" it still is.

thebaer 11y ago
It doesn't make the point invalid. There are laptops that connect to cell networks. I can make calls to landlines from my desktop. That doesn't change the name, because it does a lot more. I can also use these devices without a SIM card and never make a phone call. The evolution of the device definitely led to the name, but it's clear that that's just another peripheral use, like taking photos, listening to music, or getting turn-by-turn driving directions. If any device had all those capabilties, we'd call it a computer of some kind. You're not going to get the media to use the name "palmtop," but if the tech community adopted it I think we'd do and see things a little differently.
lfowles 11y ago
> But in the average American's day, doctors, daycare providers, clients, etc are all going to be contacting you by phone. Heh. My eye doctor just confirmed my upcoming appointment via text message. I'm sure they would be calling if anything outside of the most common case needed resolved, however.
Razengan 11y ago
Not to mention that you can have multiple accounts on any social network, and switch between them at any time, but you can have only one phone number on that mobile device, whatever you want to call it. So if that device is uniquely identifiable by a phone number, and only you can be the only user of that number at any time (again unlike social network accounts), might as well call it a phone.
- kruczek 11y ago

talles 11y ago

If I had to rename "Smartphone" I would call it "Personal Computer". My phone is way more "personal" than my desktop and laptop. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with "Smartphone". Two are the reasons: 1 - There's history there. Most of the words aren't precisely crafted by linguists when society needs them, we simply build on what already exists. The so called smartphone came from the cellphone that came from the telephone, the name itself hints you about its origins. It's fascinating what you can learn about a word when you study its etymology. http://etymonline.com http://etymonline.com 2 - Meaning wise I wouldn't worry so much about the connotations that the author mentions (I wouldn't worry at all). I'm with Wittgenstein in this one: the word means whatever we decide it means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#Meaning_is_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations#M...

punee 11y ago
I'm pretty sure that Wittgenstein, while agreeing with your point about meaning being defined by use, would still argue that there's a lot of unspoken confusion that comes from calling the smartphone a smartphone. The first thing I did when opening this thread was Ctrl+F to see if anyone was suggesting it should be called a "personal computer", because that's what I've thought best described what the smartphone really has become. Now, to suggest even trying to use that to refer to smartphones these days would be adding a much heavier does of confusion. But the insight seems fundamentally right to me. Interesting article on the subject that brings up this point: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosystems-and-the-death-of-pcs http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...

radley 11y ago

from the Greek phon: voice, sound i.e. a means to communicate. You do not call an automobile "wheeled combustion chamber".

peter303 11y ago

Note Apple came to this market from a different direction than most other cellphone makers. Their first mobile computer was a revolutionary music player (innovative UI and music store). It evolved into a sophisticated media computer with color video, wireless and computer utilities in the last iTouch before the iPhone. (Apple still ships iTouches which are the iPhone device without the cellular phone in it, or a micro iPad.) So they pretty much had a full fledge mobile computer before grafting phone technology into it.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> Their first mobile computer was a revolutionary music player The Newton was not a revolutionary music player, and no Apple music player before the iPhone was a "mobile computer" in a sense that would make this portrayal meaningful and accurate. > It evolved into a sophisticated media computer with color video, wireless and computer utilities in the last iTouch before the iPhone. iPod Touch (sometimes nicknamed "iTouch") was introduced after the iPhone, running a later version of iPhone OS (the OS which later became iOS) than the first iPhone. There was no "iTouch before the iPhone." There was the old-style wheel-controlled iPod before the iPhone, and that was a revolutionary (at least in terms of commercial impact) music player, but it wasn't a "mobile computer" in the same sense as the iPod Touch, modern smartphones, or even earlier PDAs or the Apple Newton.

nullc 11y ago

Handcuff computer was rejected by the marketing department.

OJFord 11y ago

Does anyone actually say "smartphone" except (vanishingly rarely) when necessary to describe the device in contradistinction to "dumbphones"? Is there a difference whether spoken or written? If so, where are you? I'm curious because all I hear in the UK is "phone" or "mobile" - both of which we always used. But I'm acutely aware that I hear or read "cell" in American sources significantly less often than, I think, I used to.

Kluny 11y ago
Yeah, "cell" usage is going down and "phone" is going up. Personally, I like to be needlessly formal and call mine a "telephone", and some of my friends are catching that.
loup-vaillant 11y ago
> Does anyone actually say "smartphone" except (vanishingly rarely) when necessary to describe the device in contradistinction to "dumbphones"? True. My beef isn't about "smart" however, it's about "phone". I believe my point stands even more acutely in this light.
- OJFord 11y ago
  Sure, it was something of a side-point, but the more relevant point (which I may have forgotten to make..) was that in the UK 'mobile' is still common. Although actually a contraction of 'mobile phone', it doesn't have the same 'problem' going forward, since we can just decide or assume that it refers to a mobile computing device. Possibly though things will get even more blurred than that - everything a computing device and almost all of them mobile... Time will tell!

danjayh 11y ago

> Personally, I have more faith in a third alternative: a virtual instruction set. Like bytecode, though not managed like Java, and not meant to be interpreted or JIT compiled either. It could run on the bare metal, or be translated into something that is —like the Mill CPU. That way you can keep the illusion of having a single instruction set, while sacrificing virtually nothing. Moreover, future CPUs don't even need backward compatibility, as long as you can translate (and optimise!) the virtual assembly for them. I don't think he really gets how CPUs work -- it's already that way, and has been for quite a while. The published instruction sets are the 'virtual' instructions, and translation of these instructions (be they ARM, x86, or PowerPC) is baked into each CPU's microcode. We actually have no visibility into the 'real' instructions that CPUs execute ('micro-ops'), because they're proprietary.

loup-vaillant 11y ago
The idea is to own up to this reality, and stop designing instruction sets as if they were meant run directly. x86 in particular has a legacy of simple CPUs that didn't have much of a decoding unit. But now it has gone too far in the other direction: it takes a significant amount of chip surface and energy to decode, making it unsuitable for low power situations. ARM on the other hand is probably lacking in the SIMD department (I haven't checked). We need to go back and overhaul the CPU instruction set like Vulkan, Dx12 and Mantle overhauled the GPU APIs. We need to reflect on what CPUs can do, what they can do fast, and what they can do with low power. Then we need an instruction set that would act as an API to these subsystems. Something orthogonal, that doesn't take too much energy to decode, and could be decoded in parallel if need be (for crazy desktop speed ups). While we're at it, it might be nice to have explicit support for things like pointer tags, to speed up dynamic stuff like garbage collection and runtime type information. You're right, I don't really get how CPUs work. But I did pick up a few things that lead me to trust instruction set design is not over. We can do better.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago
  When I make a long comment, I like to see explanations about what warranted a downvote. So I can learn…

ask5 11y ago

the device is still a phone, because it needs a SIM card to operate. Without it it's pretty much useless. You cant even start the iphone without it, first thing it needs is a sim card.

jdminhbg 11y ago
What? If you boot an iPhone without a SIM it'll show you a warning/error that the SIM is missing, but it still turns on and works.

joe_momma 11y ago

Dude, just give it a minute and they'll be called "tricorders" as they should be.

Animats 11y ago
We're getting closer. Caterpillar just announced their C60 smartphone with thermal imaging.[1] [1] http://www.catphones.com/en-us/phones/s60-smartphone http://www.catphones.com/en-us/phones/s60-smartphone

Animats 11y ago

This article is from France. What's the French term? Has the Académie Française decided on one yet? (Unlike English, French has an official standards body.)

loup-vaillant 11y ago
The most common term here is "portable", or "téléphone portable", or just "téléphone". "Portable" means what you think it means: you can carry it. Sometimes, (especially in the commercials), we see "mobile" instead of "portable". It also means what you think it means: you can move it. I think one reason behind the word "mobile" is because "ordinateur portable" (or "portable" for short) is already used to talk about laptops. Destkops are in rare cases called "ordinateur de bureau". Generally, we just say "PC" —unless it's from Apple. I am not aware of what the Académie Française may or may not have decided. What I love about the English language here, is that we have 3 words that neatly apply to the three form factors: desktop, laptop, and palmtop. It's a bit of a bummer we can't exploit such regularity in French. If I had to settle on a term, I'd probably try "ordinateur mobile", or "mobile" for short. Unlike "palmtop", it wouldn't scream "computer", so the best I can hope for is that we just stop using "téléphone" to describe those things.

jdlyga 11y ago

We call them "buttons" on interface windows because they look and act like mechanical buttons in the real world. But mechanical buttons have that name only because they look like shirt buttons.