That device in your pocket is smart but it’s no longer a phone.

As name guys, what to call it interests us.  “Phone” is wrong because person-to-person voice communication is a shrinking part of smartphone usage. Voice calling will soon be demoted to “an app” alongside Angry Birds and Find A Pizza.

In Japan, text messaging alone accounts for more smartphone usage than voice calls.  This trend was kick-started by NTT Docomo (the leading service provider with a 50% market share), who bundled unlimited texting into every account at the launch of its i-mode service on the smart handset below in 1999.

On a level voice-text playing field, the Japanese consumer opted for texting.

In the U.S., tariffs and rules remain tilted toward voice. Cellphone providers see themselves as “phone companies” – perhaps reflecting the views of senior telecom execs who learned the business in the halcyon days before Ma Bell was rent asunder by deregulators run amok.

The decline of voice calls is easy to understand.  Voice is “synchronous communication” – both parties must be willing and able to talk and listen at the same moment in time.

Text, mail, and just about every other act of socialization possible on your smartphone are “asynchronous”.  Each party reads, writes, or whatevers at their convenience.

So the smartphone is not a phone. Pocket computer is accurate but uninspired.  iPhone is inspired but proprietary and (forgive us Steve) inaccurate.

What to call that thing in your pocket?  The need for a new generic word cries out to us at NameLab.  It’s not a job – alas, the English language is not a paying client – but we’re on it like brown on rice (this is California, after all).

Your ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Science author James Gleick (Chaos, Genius, Faster) recently published The Information, a history and analysis of the systems humankind has created to comprehend our world.

It’s a brilliant book (someone will eventually find another adjective to describe Mr. Gleick’s works) that includes Two Wordbooks, a chapter devoted to historical linguistics.  This isn’t the intellectually radiant heart of the book (that would be the chapter on memes), but as linguists it floats our boat.

Beyond wondering why it never occurred to any of us that there was a pre-alphabetized world (with sequential alphabets but without the idea of using them to organize lists), the chapter seems to bear upon the management of identity in packaged goods marketing.

It tells the tale of Robert Cawdrey, a village priest who published a book in 1606 “for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull persons…whereby they may more easily understand many hard English wordes which they shall heare or reade in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere…”

While this wasn’t the first book of English words, it was the first alphabetized dictionary.  The concept of organizing any list by notational sequence (a, b, c…) surely occurred to someone before Cawdrey, but this is the first recorded instance that has survived (via a single copy of the book in an Oxford University library).

Are we proposing that Dannon alphabetize its yogurt flavors in supermarket chill cases?  Maybe we are.

Gleick’s book is about the importance of information to human behavior.

Wine marketing is afflicted by weak information structure.  It’s clear that the chaos of wine identity drives consumers to other, more comprehensible beverage categories.

It seems impossible to us that the same eyes and brains won’t prefer a better-organized brand to a disorderly one.

Do you market soups? Detergents? Painkillers? Tampons?

Is your shelf of subtypes more clearly organized than the other guy’s?