The name game

Hearing voices

By Greg Adams, Auckland | Friday, 25 November 2011
You’ll have seen recently that Android 4.0 has been launched. It’s the latest version of Google’s mobile OS and essentially combines the Android 2 phone interface with the Android 3 tablet interface into a super-duper new version.

“Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — easy multitasking, rich notifications, customisable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing,” proclaims Google.

Sounds cool.

What’s new? Well, the keyboard and dictionaries have been revamped. There’s a new typeface fashioned after Roboto. Like iOS, it now has home screen folders and you can group apps or shortcuts together. There’s also Face Unlock that, as the name suggests, unlocks a handset based on facial recognition technology.

Very cool.

And let’s not forget it has a new voice input engine and re-sizeable widgets, as well as Android Beam, a feature for sharing across two Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled devices.

“It’s incredibly simple and convenient to use — there’s no menu to open, application to launch, or pairing needed. Just touch one Android-powered phone to another, then tap to send,” says one enthusiastic comment on an Android developers’ forum.

Anyhow, the list of whizz-bang features goes on and on.

Needless to say it’s all the talk of the tech world, especially if Android is your thing. Yet this sweet taste of popularity and success leaves me with one sour note — the name. It’s officially titled Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. What on earth is that all about? I guess we should have seen it coming following, as it does, in the footsteps of Cupcake, Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

The tech world is not without the odd name. Clearly food is popular, with Apples, Blackberrys, Apricots, Sausage, spam, cookies, and so on. Then there are animals, like Leopard, Lion, Butterfly and Python. We have Wii, Skype, DOS, wiki, Ubuntu, Cisco, Nokia, Adobe, Yahoo, Zune, modem, browser, blog, blob, BLOT, Blu-Ray, and more.

Some names are portmanteau; others are acronyms and abbreviations. There are rivers, codenames, and then there are simply made-up words. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated Electronics — Intel. I think that was definitely a lucky break.

Of course, part of the reason for these names is the need to find an original moniker to get a dotcom domain — others are simply mistakes. A search engine dreamed up by Larry Page and Sergey Brin was originally called BackRub. The story goes that Googolplex (the mathematical unit that refers to extremely large numbers) was suggested as an alternative but Larry decided on the shortened form googol, which was mis-spelled as ‘google’ and the rest is a history of extremely large numbers.

So, we’re plagued with weird, wonderful, odd and just plain daft names, and probably stuck with a never-ending supply of them. But Ice Cream Sandwich really takes the biscuit. What next? ‘Android 5.0 Hot Choc Fudge Pie with Sprinkles and Banana Custard’?