Android Phone Name Generator

Coming soon: The LG Hero Plus! The Sony Ericsson Liquid! The Motorola Devour Prime!

The most awesome site I've seen this week, the Android Phone Name Generator remixes the increasingly ridiculous names of Android phones into appallingly plausible new names for Android phones.

The site illustrates a major problem for the successful, rampaging new smartphone OS: there are so many smartphones out there that it's becoming impossible to sort, differentiate, or understand the chaotic word salad on carriers' shelves.

Earlier today I was back in our inventory department sorting out phones for Jamie and Alex to review, and I was paralyzed: did we do the LG DoublePlay? Or just the Samsung DoubleTime? (Answer: both.) How about the HTC Wildfire S for MetroPCS? (Answer: We've done the Wildfire S for T-Mobile, and there's also a just-plain-Wildfire.)

Hey, I spend all day memorizing these names. How hard must it be for you?

At Least They Use Words

Tough as the situation is, it could be much worse. As humans, we're programmed to understand words. Motorola and Nokia used to tag their phones with a mind-numbing array of extremely similar numbers: the 3100, 3105, 3108, 3109, 3110, 3120, 3125.

And today's laptops and desktops also have major issues. What's the difference between the HP TouchSmart 520-1030 and the HP TouchSmart 520-1050? It could be something as minor as some extra memory, or something as radical as a totally different processor. The only people these model names help are retail stockists. There, Apple has things right: one of their computers would be a "MacBook Pro 15-inch, 2.2Ghz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD." You know what that is.

A few smartphone manufacturers have been trying to simplify things, which helps both their brands and consumers. Take the LG Optimus One line, or Samsung's Galaxy S series. Want a cool, high-performance Android smartphone? Get a Galaxy S, whatever number. The current number is Galaxy S II. Next year it'll be GS III.

Unfortunately, the wireless carriers actively make things more confusing because they want all of their phones to appear unique. So the peaceful LG Optimus S/T/U/V/M - simple, easy to understand, with a letter designating the carrier - became the violent Vortex on Verizon, and both the Phoenix and the Thrive on AT&T. Same phone. Verizon and AT&T just didn't want theirs to sound like everyone else's.

Eventually we're just going to run out of English-language words for these things. Already, you can write entire sentences just made up of Samsung model names. My friends and I play that game on Twitter sometimes. "The Samsung Epic Strives to Restore the Caliber of Reality." (Thanks, Jamie.)

Something's going to break. Hopefully someone will make these guys simplify and focus their brands. If not, we'll end up going back to numbers, or start making up words and using random place names like car companies do. (I drove my Tucson past your Tribeca!)

But for now, how about a Sony Ericsson Dream Touch Prime II 3D?

For more entertainment, check out the 15 Phones With Funny Names slideshow below, featuring the worst phone name in all of recorded history, the HP iPAQ Glisten.
