4 ms·
These are not phones. A smart phone is not a phone. Perhaps we should drop the phone tag? It's like how podcasts aren't limited to iPods. It's a term that no lo
by thedaemon 8y ago
These are not phones. A smart phone is not a phone. Perhaps we should drop the phone tag? It's like how podcasts aren't limited to iPods. It's a term that no longer means what it says.
- WorldMaker 8y agoI think it's an interesting bend of language. I've wondered if phone is just getting slowly recycled as the word for "handheld computer". It's not a bad reuse of the word, but does lead to a lot of interesting questions about future usage of the word. Would it colonize other computing spaces? "Deskphone" and "Lapphone" instead of "Desktop" and "Laptop", for instance? That's kind of the future of the word that AT&T envisioned back in the 1950s and 1960s Worlds Fairs and Advertising strategies, so it has a weird retro sci-fi charm here as well, were that to happen. (Though I'm very pro reusing old, small tech words in new ways. I very much advocate that we should recycle "facsimile machine" aka "fax machine" to mean "3-D Printer", giving us the word "fax" back as "thing I 3-D printed", which currently doesn't really have a good word.)