> iOS (iPod and iPad2) and Android user (Samsung Exhibit II) here.
When I first read your post, I thought you intended this as a snarky remark about the ongoing lawsuits, until I looked it up and found that Samsung really does have a phone named the "Exhibit II". Why do phone manufacturers in particular have such poor taste in naming, and keep picking names with no obvious naming scheme or consistency?
I would be very curious to know the history of this phenomenon (product naming, and in particular electronic product naming). It seems like Sony electronics in the 80's followed this pattern. It was always like the Trinitron DX-3095 and the DX-2085.
Cell phones also follow this throwaway name pattern. I guess there are brands like the RAZR and Droid, but the individual models have throwaway names.
Where do those numbers come from? Does some one just make up some nonsense? Sometimes they put the screen diagonal in there but I think more often than not they have no bearing on the product.
Is it because finding trademarks is hard? After all, Apple paid a ton of money for the iPhone trademark.
Was there a time, like back in the 50's, where companies used normal names for electronic products like stereos?
Software used to follow version numbers, like 1.0, 2.0, etc. But then Microsoft changed it to 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc. And then Apple changed it to Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, etc. Which I think are more friendly names. Ubuntu seemed to follow in Apple's lead with Hardy Haron and so forth.
I guess with software you have a linear sequence of products. With hardware, they seem to produce a lot of useless variants (except Apple), so you can't number them 1,2,3 / A,B,C.
I do not see why you think "Exhibit II" on the one hand and "DX-3095" and the "DX-2085" follow the same naming pattern.
To me, the first looks like a marketing name, and the second like one that only makes sense to the manufacturer. I am assuming that the numbers do have meaning here.
Marketing names may or may not be intended to be short-lived. Sometimes, they just become short-lived, either because of how they behave in the market (see: Edsel), of internal politics (a new brand manager steps in; (s)he cannot claim the previous manager did a fine job, so something must change), or due to short-term profit hunting ("device named 'X' sells well! Let's make a low-budget one and sell even more!"-"But we would have to cut quality to make it cheaper"-"Yeah so?")
There also seems to be this notion "if consumers are confused, they will pick a brand at random. The more brands there are, the easier they get confused. I will make lots of brands, so that they will get confused, and pick a random brand. Since I have so many brands, chances are they will pick mine.". That approach leads to short-lived brand names.
As to that DX-3095 naming scheme: chances are that it was taken directly from the manufacturer's internal tracking system. The first digit might indicate the factory or the PCB version, or whatever, the second the quality of the tube, etc. That may or may not give useful information to customers.
When I first read your post, I thought you intended this as a snarky remark about the ongoing lawsuits, until I looked it up and found that Samsung really does have a phone named the "Exhibit II". Why do phone manufacturers in particular have such poor taste in naming, and keep picking names with no obvious naming scheme or consistency?