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Amazon’s tortured naming

Over the years, Microsoft had developed a reputation for having bad product names. But its been surprising to see two of the rather rare consumer device success stories burden their tablets with excessive detail about their screen size. The earlier offender has been Samsung, which has appended such designations as 7.7, 8.9 and 10.1 to its Galaxy Tab tablets. There is a case for a bit of numerical detail as Samsung has been the most aggressive in filling in almost every conceivable screen size along the tablet spectrum, but there’s nothing wrong with rounding. Retailers, for example, now offer TVs of similar but perhaps not exact size under a classificaiton such as “55-inch class”)

Clearly a company that is above mere gadgets would avoid such clumsy naming. Well, say hello to the Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE Wireless. How can one pare down this beast of a name? First, both “4G” and “Wireless” are redundant to “LTE” although it may e the case that AT&T insisted on the label “4G LTE,” mirroring the phrasing used by Verizon. (At least in AT&T’s case, it practially differentates from 4G HSPA+). Then, of course, one could round up that whole tenth of an inch and just label it a 9″ device. Finally, the “HD” is superfluous since Amazon doesn’t make a 9″ tablet (see how easy that was?) that isn’t HD. What are you left with? Kindle Fire 9 LTE — a device ready to go take on the iPad and not the iPad 9.7″ 4G LTE Wireless.

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