Product Naming Ridiculousness - Damn You, Technology

Product Naming is just plain getting out of hand.

I've been rolling this post around in my head for quite some time, mainly since the Android Tablet manufacturers are out there spitballing to find the perfect screen size and, while doing so, becoming progressively lazier with their naming conventions. What pushed me over the edge, though, was a Sprint commercial for their version of the Galaxy S II phone, lovingly named the "Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch". Hell, I'm out of breath just saying it.

I know, I know...the same phones are named differently for different carriers plus, for whatever reason, Sprint feels the need to advertise both 4G AND touch in the phone's name, but Sammy is probably the worst offender of the bunch. Case in point: Samsung's Galaxy Tab line. First, they come onto the scene with the original Galaxy Tab - a thick little tablet that ran Froyo (released pre-Honeycomb) and was essentially a large phone (much like the original iPad, except smaller). The the Motorola Xoom came out with Honeycomb closely followed by the impressively thin iPad 2. Samsung reacted by releasing their thin Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 which was the beginning of the lazy naming conventions. Samsung followed this shot of an iPad clone (don't call it that) with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and then the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 and finishing up with the revamped Galaxy Tab which they dubbed the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

It's a big nasty jumbled mess. Of course, round 2 will get a bit cleaner once Samsung knows which sizes sell better than others, but for now the market is swamped. Motorola, no doubt feeling the heat from the "slimmer is better" crowd followed up their original Motorola Xoom with the infamously renamed Motorola Xyboard 10.1 and Xyboard 8.9 (still should've been called the Xoom 2). As more players toss their hats in the ring, we'll slowly continue to drown in the flood of lazy naming conventions. Of course if the manufacturers keep naming their phones after condoms (The Intercom Blog via Gizmodo), we'll be able to predict all future phone names.

So how do we fix this hot mess? Well, it's actually quite simple. First, drop the numbers in the names. You have serial numbers and the product code, so use them. It works for TV's (46LN550A is Samsung's 46" LCD TV from the 500 Series) so why can't it work for phones? Granted, there are insane amounts of new phones coming out at such break neck speeds that it's tough to keep track of them all.

Second, we can take a look at the "Series" naming conventions. Sticking with the worst offender, Samsung already has the Galaxy platform and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but their fatal flaw was that they lumped everything under the same moniker thus making the family name as meaningless as the individual product names. If you don't own a Fascinate or a Captivate (or whatever the Sprint option was), you'd be hard pressed to know which carrier they belonged to and whether or not they were even part of the Galaxy lineup of phones.

If you tie the family names to product sizes then you've instantly made a subconscious connection. The word Galaxy makes you think of something large, right? So Galaxy instantly becomes your family name for very similar Tablets (since they're bigger..get it?). That opens up a list of known galaxy names that could be used or the constellations that are associated with them like Andromeda or Draco. Pick a smaller frame of reference for the phones like the solar system and then name those grouped as planets. I know my ideas aren't perfect but they're logical and easier to remember that the current conventions.

Next up is the "sequel" convention. There have always been sequels in naming products as long as I can remember. The idea behind it, of course, is instant brand recognition. Everyone instantly recognizes iPhone, iPad and Playstation plus if you asked the average consumer, they could probably tell you some differences between each revision. That being said, the sequels are coming so fast in the phone world that by the time you get your hands on the new one, the next new one is coming out within a month. I like to personally refer to this as Apple Syndrome. The latest blight from the sequel game is the "incremental" sequel where instead of having a true new product, there's a relatively small tweak and a new release.

Typically, it's something along the lines of taking a device and making it skinnier and lighter (which also just so happens to help a manufacturer pull cost out and maybe make a product profitable). Unofficially, I would credit the video game industry for popularizing this trend with great examples coming from the smaller SNES, the PS2 Slim, and the PS3 Slim. In the phone world, Apple took this a bit further and went from the iPhone 3 to the iPhone 3G (adding 3G unsurprisingly) to the iPhone 3GS (slimmed down). The followed up with the redesigned iPhone 4 then instead of announcing the iPhone 5, they pulled a fast one and released the iPhone 4S which not only looked the same but offered marginal increases, antenna tweaks and Siri. I believe Apple might be attempting to buck this trend a bit by hitting the reset button on "The New iPad" which would normally be called iPad 3. We'll know for sure if this is their true intention if the next iPhone is announced as "The New iPhone" instead of iPhone 5.

Hopefully soon we'll see some sense come into the heads of these manufacturers. Trust me, it will help them all in the long run.

Until then always remember
It is the Geeks that will inherit the Earth