What if iPhone 5 isn't called 'iPhone' at all?

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

They say that Apple disrupts markets.

At least that's what the legends tell us. Cupertino marches in, creates something that is a little different, looks a little different, does something a little different, or is merely oddly understandable to a real human being.

For many real people, the iPad was something the likes of which they had never seen before or ever really imagined. Within an instant, it took over a market and became that market: the iPad market.

On the other hand, smartphones are becoming ubiquitous. One look at Samsung's Galaxy S3 and it looks like the newest, and perhaps even sexiest, version of, well, a smartphone.

The problem with the word smartphone is that part of it has become a little old-- redundant, even. That part isn't the smart part. It's the phone part.

In calling something a "smartphone," you're telling people that the core of it is still a phone -- a machine whose top part you put to your ear and whose bottom part you put to your lips. Yes, just like Alexander Graham Bell might have done.

Yet for many people that phone part is the least of their concerns. Their iPhones are for e-mailing, texting, tweeting, app-loading and, most of all, locating potential lovers on Facebook and staring at their pictures.

That thing in their pockets is something t... [Read more]