Who was it who said, “Everything old is new again”?  Reading David Pogue’s NYT column yesterday on the Droid phone, I was struck by an odd sense of deja vu at his introduction. In view of the expanded functionality of mobile phones, he said, “smartphone” no longer works as the name of the category, so we need a new term for the device that better describes their roles in our lives. Crowd-sourcing the problem to his Twitter followers, he reported that his favorite proposal among those responses was “app phone.”

My deja vu cloud cleared when I realized I had written a stunningly similar column for the Yankee Group website… in April 2006.  What that says, I guess, is that it has taken three years for what our industry knew to be true to become true to someone as connected, but focused on mass market issues, as Pogue.

Here is my original column from three and a half years ago:

A friend’s daughter was recently studying her lines for a production of Romeo & Juliet. Together we looked at the monolog by Juliet ruing her beau’s unfortunate surname, including the line, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Can’t agree, actually: Romeo might have been as handsome if he weren’t a Montague, but what we call things can have an ineffable and long-lasting impact on how we see them. Case in point: our new digital best friend, the mobile phone. Some in the US call it my cell, the Italians say la mia portabile and the Japanese use the term keitai denwa  But is it really just a phone? Less so than it used to be.

With a camera, memory slots, video playback, and enough messaging options to overwhelm anyone born before the onset of IM, it hardly seems right to constrain the thing with a name that now covers just a fraction of the functionality. Even more so as the torrid pace of new model introductions continues. Few in the industry would debate the new reality: Just as the PC displaced the minicomputer as the focus of computing innovation, the mobile handset has begun to displace the PC.

Indeed, Nokia is actively pushing alternative nomenclature into the  keitai denwa domain with its new line of N-Series “multimedia computers”. But on a web page describing an impressive array of products it expects to release (including the N93), there’s that pesky word again—phone. The king is dead—long live the king.

With this on my mind, I wandered a wireless industry tradeshow in April and asked two dozen booth denizens this question: Five years from now, when you discover you’ve left your house without it, how will you complete this request to your friend: “Wait a minute—I have to run back inside for my __________” ? Answers fell neatly into a couple of categories:

•  Handheld. The first and most useful half of “handheld device,” matching previous colloquial naming dropping the second word of formations such as laptop (computer), transistor (radio) and television (set).
• A two-or- three-letter acronym (TLA). Analogies offered up included PC, CD, DVD, and of course TV. The most laughable suggestion in this category, from an immediately embarrassed Microsoftie who made me swear never to reveal his name, which I won’t do as long as his checks don’t bounce, was WMD (for wireless multimedia device, not a weapon of mobile destruction) If we have to go this route, let’s hope it’s something as pronounceable as scuba (originally, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus)
• The brand that cracks the code. Along the lines of Xerox used (illegally) to describe all copiers, and increasingly, iPod for portable music players, some predicted the adoption of whatever name borne by an as-yet-unavailable device that unlocks a new wave of functionality. Having already adopted TiVo as a verb myself, and knowing how a breakout brand’s dramatic step away from the pack can unleash mass adoption, I like this idea. Just wish I knew who was going to do it. Most of my interviewees were betting on Apple.

 Honorary mention goes to the answer I got from Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola: “I’m going to call it the thing I can’t leave my house without. Which it already is.” In his case, however, it’s a $1,000 limited-edition bronze Dolce & Gabbana RAZR, which matched his sport coat very well. (Belatedly, with an apologetic glance at his PR exec, he amended his answer to, “My RAZR.”)

Moment of truth: A substantial group of neocons insisted on phone, pointing out that the one-syllable word is clear enough and easy to say, and thus generally not linguistically broken.

Me? I’ll bet on handheld.

 ————

OK, we’re back in late 2009 now. Amusingly, the only thing that really feels dated to me now about that column is the fact that Ed Zander isn’t the Motorola CEO anymore.

“App phone” ? I say UGH, big-time. What do you think?