Why the heck did Google name the phone the “Nexus One”? The marketing department has been watching too many reruns of Blade Runner recently? The word has three syllables, is hard to pronounce, and is hard to combine with other words in an English sentence.
Apple/Google
That’s juxtaposition. That’s poetry.
iPhone/Nexus One
That is cruel. No complementarity. No music.
“Hi John. Did you buy your new Nexus One today?”.
Or
“Hey Mary, how do you like your Nexus One?”.
Sorry, it’s not going to make it into the English lexicon like “iPhone” did about five seconds after it was announced.
“iPhone” has the word “phone” in it along with the word “I”. It says it all.
“Nexus One” *almost* says “next”. “Nex” reminds us of “Next”. That would have been a better name: The Google Nex. Short, abstract, carries a message.
Or the Glint. That would have been nice. There are any number of short, catchy words that could have been used, some with meaning some with just simple look and feel. “Nexus One” has none of that.
Language has a life of its own, as the overpaid, or should I say the needlessly paid big Pharma marketing executives know as they derive more and more of those in-your-face new brand names for the drugs used by our over drugged population. Oh, I’m drifting, sorry…
I think the English lexicon will settle quite simply on “Google phone”.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Isn’t there already something, a company maybe, called Nextel?
How about the Next Phone instead? Or, perhaps, The Goog?
Maybe, the Grok? Okay, wait a minute, how about MyFone?
Shit, I don’t even care.
I toltally disagree. I really like the name Nexus One. English Lexicon. Say what? What are you talking about. What set your off on this diatribe. How about stupid words like Google, blackberry, twitter, and email for that matter. Do you need meds. Actually I can’t believe I wasted my time even thinking about this stupidity.
All of the other names you mention have organic origins and have caught on partly for that reason. Nexus one is dead out of the box. Today people asked me twice about the “Google phone”. No one will remember Nexus One much less use the term. Let’s check back in a year and see what happened.
iphone/apple
Poetry? I think you should see a Doctor. Goolgle is organic. I thought it was baby talk. Twitter is organic? They are stupid baby talk.
What is even more stupid is that I am responding to suc a silly idiotic rant.
I think Nexus One is beatiful organic and poetic and it glows with the commonality of our culture.
Maybe I am all wet. I did a quick search on the web (using Google) and found a few people who really like the name. Except the relatives of Philip K Dick, who are suing Google!
Google comes from “Googol”, a term coined in 1938 by mathematician Edward Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta. So maybe Google is, literally, baby talk, as Mike suggests. A brief funny history of the name provided by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex#History and involves reference to an Italian boxing champion.
Maybe it is a take off on the Henry Miller book “Sexus, Plexus, Nexus”. I think it has a nice ring to it.
The name is from the android character in the movie Blade Runner played by Rutger Hauer. He is a “Nexus One” model android made by the Tyrell Corporation. Note that the name of the Google phone operating system is “Android’.