‘Superphone’ Is Arbitrary And Google Needs To Stop Using It

Superphone. If you weren’t reading our liveblog of the Google event, it’s the term their Android team kept using to describe the Nexus One. But why?

It bugged us so much that I had to ask for clarification. After all, what kind of person makes up a new term for smartphones and expects other people to use it? I mean, c’mon right? Google’s official answer is that because of the 1GHz processor, the high amount of RAM, the Google apps and all the software innovations they’ve made in the Nexus One, the phone is one step higher than smartphones. And it’s almost equivalent to the laptops you were using four or five years ago. But… really? Superphone?

Because what happens in a few years when these phones are going to have quad-core processors, Xbox 360–level graphics, 4G, and screen resolutions that are on par with what you’re currently using on laptops in 2010. What then? Super super phones? It makes no sense.

The worst bit is that Google is actually serious with this superphone terminology. One of the presenters said something like, “the superphones of today are going to be the smartphones of tomorrow”, which basically implies that superphone is just a high-end smartphone. So, smartphone will be fine. A phone doesn’t cease being a smartphone just because it’s a few years old – but it will cease being a superphone because it’s not top of the line anymore.

Yeah, let’s drop this now and stick with that name that other jerk came up with.