During the bustle of the holiday season, one particular smartphone commercial gave me pause. It was an ad for “the world’s thinnest smartphone,” a handset I had never heard before, called the Kazam Tornado 348.
Of course the one-minute commercial itself was bizarre and stupid. Ignoring the ridiculous and gratuitous 40-second arse shot you have to get through before you actually get to the smartphone, I still couldn’t get over just how dumb that name sounded.
For electronics in particular, there is a lot in a name. Nexus? Totally cool, and has a kind of sci-fi awesomeness to it. iPhone? Pretty much as iconic as it gets. So on and so on. But if someone asked me what kind of smartphone I had and I was, for whatever reason, caught with this thing — I’d rather smash the gadget into the ground and say “what smartphone?” than utter the words “Kazam Tornado.”
What about you? Have you ever stumbled upon a gadget designation so dumb that you almost couldn’t bear repeating it?