Cell phones with ridiculous names (photos)

The Samsung :) "Smiley" isn't the first phone to sport a ridiculous name. But it did get us thinking of some of the worst offenders.

Kent German

July 15, 2010 5:45 p.m. PT

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Josh Miller/CNET

Samsung :)

You know that we had to lead this one, but the :), aka the Smiley (our preferred name), really broke us. In fact, it even prompted this entire photo gallery. Really, Samsung, an emoticon for a cell phone? We realize that it must be difficult to come up with so many names, but this one is just unacceptable, even for a texting handset.

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LG Fusic

An early music handset, the Fusic looked vaguely like an iPod and it offered one of the first FM transmitters on a cell phone. We expect that the name is a combination of "fun" and "music," though even that is a stretch. In the end, it wasn't a bad phone, but its name wasn't music to our ears.

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Corrine Schulze/CNET

HTC Ozone

Why you'd want to name a phone after something that causes smog is beyond us. True, ozone is beneficial when it's higher in the atmosphere, but that takes far too much thought to conceptualize.

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Josh Miller/CNET

Verizon Wireless Razzle

Perhaps Pantech's designers had just watched "Chicago" when they named the Razzle. Though the handset offered an interesting design, does it give us that razzle dazzle? Not so much.

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Corinne Schulze/CNET

Samsung Soul

It seems a bit presumptuous to determine that a gadget has a soul, but apparently Samsung thought so when it named the Soul.

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Corinne Schulze/CNET

Virgin Mobile TNT

Kapow! The TNT is so explosive it might just blow up in your hands! Run for your life! In reality, however, the TNT is just another basic handset for Virgin Mobile. And we don't like its other name, the Kyocera Adreno, either.

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Josh Miller/CNET

Cricket MsgM8

Samsung tried a similar move in 2008 when it named a phone the Innov8. Though that made some sense considering the phone had an 8-megapixel camera, Cricket fails to capture our attention with the MsgM8. Why not just use "mate" at the end and really, what's with the second capital M?

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Josh Miller/CNET

Samsung TwoStep

Of course, we always think of dancing when we think of cell phones. That must be why Samsung chose TwoStep for this U.S. Cellular handset.

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Nokia

Nokia Supernova

Get ready for another bang! This time it's Nokia with an explosion so big, it wipes out an entire solar system! Blam...it's a supernova!

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Corinne Schulze/CNET

Samsung Messager

We had to close with the Messager since it really grinds the gears of CNET's copy editors. For the record, Samsung, the word is messenger. Somewhere in your quest to be creative for a texting phone, you made a big typo.