Shorter Phone Names, Please

I recently got a press release that said "with the ," you can ...

No. Absolutely not. We need to draw the line.

Mobile phone names have grown to absurd lengths. This is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it shows the screwed-up priorities of the U.S. mobile phone industry, where the carriers, not the consumers, are the customers.

Most of these ridiculous names result from carrier interference. Sprint is historically the worst offender: I give you 2004's . Consider the insecurity and passive-aggressiveness inherent in that name. It starts out with a declaration that the carrier is the most important thing here, then runs through a worry that you won't know what features it offers before relegating the actually relevant name of the phone's maker to the end.

You see the same sort of insecurity in the MPQ4L, above. Sprint is nervous that you might confuse its new, LTE 4G network with its old, WiMAX 4G network, so it's forcing additional chunks onto the phone name. I don't want to pick on Sprint, though, so I also give you the "," which is actually the formal name of a phone on Verizon.

The effect of these ridiculous monikers is subtle, but I think it's real. Like a tough guy who insists on talking about how tough he is, this makes you wonder why the carrier has to pile every flagship feature into a name. At the very least, it makes me think that the carrier and OEM won't bother to run a marketing campaign that would make the phone's features self-evident. Isn't there something a little bolder about the quiet confidence of "?"

It's possible to go too far in the other direction, too. There's a lot of speculation that Apple's new iPhone will just be called the "Apple iPhone." That would be cruel. If you do it to multiple generations of products in a row (as Apple has done with laptops and iPod touches), you sow massive confusion about what version of the product people have, and you force people to create awkward fake names like "."

Fixing the Phone Names
So here's what you get (and you don't get upset).

• Manufacturer name
• Product line identifier
• Product line modifier

That's it. You do not get to add the carrier name to the phone name. You do not get to add the network technology to the phone name. You never get to add punctuation. If you have a comma in your phone name, your name is too long.

The Apple iPhone 4S obeys this rule. The Motorola Droid 4 obeys the rule. The HTC One S obeys the rule. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 obeys the rule. The Samsung Galaxy S III is a lovely phone, but fails the test.

The (above) is the worst offender in recent history. The has similar issues. The Motorola Photon Q 4G LTE needs to have the last two, useless elements dropped. Then it would be fine.

I'm going to keep this column short, in the theme of this column. Yes, we're not talking about world-changing truths here. But I think consumers would be well served by a moratorium on these silly quintuple-barrelled names. Don't you agree?