I'm presuming that the iPhone is not being used for phone calls by the majority of today's users.<p>What should Ive and Jobs have named it to make sense in in the 202x's and onwards ?
You are suggesting that the entemology of the word fixes the meaning of the word forever. Whereas the word itself can change meaning as time passes.<p>Those things we carry around were called phones, because they were invented to make phone calls. They evolved into so much more, but the thing you carry around is still called a phone.<p>Jobs introduced it as 3 devices in one, a phone, a music player, and an internet browser. Should he have called it iBrowse or iMusic?<p>This morphing of meaning is part of language - Facebook is not a book, and is mostly not face's. Should it me called something else?
Although it's used for web, music, video, chat...at the end of the day the most important function (in my opinion) is being able to call/receive someone during an urgent situation wherever I may be e.g. my partner, the hospital or emergency services. I could give up all the media but I couldn't give up having a phone, and hence the name iPhone still makes sense to me.
My primary use case for carrying it everywhere is to take phone calls, as it is for most people, otherwise we'd probably all use iPads or iPod Touches or something. It's useful because it's an internet device in your pocket, but it couldn't be that if it wasn't already in your pocket for a reason.
An (i)nternet-connected Phone, stating quite clearly its dependency upon data connectivity as well as its ubiquity.<p>As for “phone” calls, all modern telephony is predicated upon mechanisms for packet transfer, so the moniker no less applies now than it did then.
It's a device that connects to your local telco network. Telcos have evolved from calls to data. I'd say it still fits. It's a device that connects to your telco to serve internet access these days.
But... these things we all carry around are still called phones right?<p>And then there's the $123.9 billion in revenue they just reported last week. Seems like the name isn't <i>that</i> terrible...