Saturday, May 22, 2010

Nokia's ark

Have you ever noticed that the predictive text dictionary on your phone is missing words?  I think it's fair enough that they might leave out swear words or racial slurs.  Such things might, somehow, at some point in the far future (or else in America) cause some kind of PR disaster.

But my phone doesn't have the word "penguin" in it.  It hasn't inconvenienced me too badly so far - in fact I only discovered the shortcoming today after owning my phone for 3 years.  But why has this word been left out?  Perhaps it is actually a racial slur or swear word that I am not aware of.  "What the penguin do you think you're doing?"

A quick bit of experimenting reveals that "hippopotamus" is another word that is missing.  It also doesn't know "giraffe", and takes a guess that perhaps I mean "iircede".  Good guess Mr Phone-guy, but no.  On the other hand, "rhinoceros" is in there, as is "leopard", "tiger", "lion", "hyena", but not "cheetah", "zebu", "oryx", or "alpaca".  "Koala" and "kangaroo" are in but "echidna" and "wallaby" are out.

I really can't imagine what the defining criteria might be for whether an animal name is in or out.  Surely they didn't just get a room full of Nokia engineers to quickly jot down the names of all the animals they could think of.  Surely.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Huh, Nokia? WHUT?

Three words - see if you can rearrange them and make a sentence - "BUY AN APPLE".

You can't seriously be a med student and not have a smart phone. How can you twitter on Nokia?

Nokia is fine if you're bad at ordering Italian takeaway, but not for telephones.

Anonymous said...

PS BTW PTR, great subject line.

"Nokia's ark" is comedy gold!

PTR said...

In answer to your question: $$$$