Based on a survey of the infallible internet, the iPhone 4S is topping this year’s holiday tech wish list. It provides much of the same convenience as an iPad (Number two on the wish list) for a much more reasonable price. Not to mention that it can be used to make phone calls.

In fact, with all the handy apps and features, sometimes it is easy to forget that at the end of the day, it’s a phone. It says it right there in the name: iPhone.

And so today, I call on freethinkers everywhere to join with me in the (dubiously) important crusade: Change the name of the iPhone.

Really, it’s just embarrassing to my $20 cell to be classed with the shiny new iPhone 4S. My phone is filling its job description admirably. I have no problem with verbal communication at all. Not only can I make and receive calls, pick up voice-mails and save phone numbers, I can even send and receive text messages. Which for those of us unskilled at small talk, is not something to be undervalued as a technological advancement in the field of information exchange. As an added perk, I’ve got a couple of games which serve to keep me busy in long lines for the ladies’ room. I therefore consider my loyal cell phone to have gone above and beyond the call of duty.

I’m no luddite- I see the appeal of smartphones. I just have trouble classing them as phones. The phones of my youth have more in common with the crank phones you see in movies than with smartphones. If you ask any adult to draw a quick cartoon of a phone, it will inevitable be a large square-ish base with a number pad and a handset attached by a spiral cord.

So here’s the philosophical question I leave you to ponder today: At what point does a technology develop so far from its original design that we decide it’s an entirely different item?

I honestly don’t have an answer, I just know that I’m not ready to give up on my idea of the phone with the spiral cord.