| Nomenclature, Nomenclature... And a Chocolate Sprint Phone Too | | Print | |
| Written by Christopher Price | |||||||
| Sunday, 30 April 2006 | |||||||
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Yes, Sprint changed their naming convention again? Why is this worthy of a blog post? Because every time they do this we have to jump through about a dozen hoops...
Originally, it was simple. Every Sprint manufacturer had their own Sprint or CDMA-centric prefix. Sanyo had SCP, Samsung had SPH (which, just to make it confusing, they also use for Korean phones) and LG had LX (which they use for all CDMA handsets except for Verizon, which they use VX). It was good, it was great, it was easy. We just dropped off the prefix, and sent each phone on its merry way. Then someone at Sprint had the idea of making their own model names. We don't know if it was some crazy idea to mimic KDDI (who has phones so heavily customized they use the same model number for different manufacturers... W21S, W21SA, W21T, etc). But, then we had to carry these stupid extra names. For example, A620/VGA1000 or 5400/RL2500. They got a little more sane about it. Okay, no more semi-semi-partially-baked names. Now, we'll have these cute prefixes. Okay... we'll play along, again. VI-RL-MM-PM-SP-IP-PP (okay, we made up PP). Now, the Nextel marketeers have won out... no more extra stuff. But, we have the Motorola C290, Sanyo 3100, Samsung A580, and LG LX-350. Yes, we're now using the LX-prefix on LG phones. What? You didn't memo? Okay, we'll confess, we have inside info here to explain. LG will be rolling out other prefixes to cater to the Sprint and other branded crowds. KG is one being flotated around, as are others (that's Chocolate Sprint Phone for those of you not in Overland Park). The point is attention to detail. We not only have to keep track of... everything, we even have to make sense of the things that don't, can't make sense from just their inital appearance.
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