Naming the iPhone

Lots of people have mentioned that the name "iPhone" is a bit...constricting when it comes to describing all the things this device does, er, will do, er, is supposed to be able to do. I was thinking this morning that the move away from the "iPod " convention is an interesting and not entirely obvious decision. It was probably driven by the fact that Apple can't sell this thing itself, but instead had to contract with a mobile provider to distribute it. Calling it "iPod Phone" would be clunky at best, but why not something more generic like "iPod Communicator" or "iPod Link"? To me, putting "phone" in there at all kind of skews the perception of the device as something that is primarily for talking. Perhaps that's how some would use it, but from what I can tell the thrust of the keynote was not to focus solely on that capability.

If (when!) the iPhone's design and OS migrate to a non-phone package, it won't be a huge change - some buttons lost, a portion of the software excised, but otherwise the same device. It's already pretty thin for a phone, and removing the comm chipset and antenna that are no doubt adding to the "bulk" would make it a pretty cool iPod/PDA indeed. In fact, if the wi-fi were kept in, it would be arguably the best stab yet at the Xerox PARC "pad" concept that was dreamed up so very long ago in the Ubiquitous Computing project.

Seems to me that the iPhone is just the first shot at an entirely revised iPod line that throws the "wheel" concept nearly out the window in favor of buttonless multi-touch and widescreen form factor. I wouldn't be surprised if the big sellers in this new design family aren't the phones at all, but the non-phone devices spawned off of it. Or perhaps they'll always have cellular capabilities, or morph into Skype phones, or something along those lines. Now I'm just spitballing, but you get my point. "iPhone" amounts to a pretty nifty misdirection away from the true promise of this design.