(Re)Naming Things
I find it absurd that we continue to call smartphones, smartphones. It’s not really a phone, and its smartness is questionable. A more accurate name for it is perhaps pocket personal computer. In a similar vein, I think smartwatches should be called wearable personal computers.
The absurdness is that the first order approximation of my mental model of a smartphone is that it is a phone calling device, when in reality I rarely use it as a phone; I use it primarily as a personal computer. However, the phone in the name continues to reinforce this odd belief. This is also why I don’t use a smartwatch: I don’t want to wear a personal computer. I mean, why would anyone want that?
Perhaps we leave these misrepresentative names around out of laziness or habit. Or maybe it benefits someone (in this case, the phone and network companies) that the names are left as they are, and so we never get around to changing them.