It's slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.

Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges "tapes." It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest in understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It's a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.

The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. This would have been state of the art in the 1960's. It's possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I'm not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it's worth, I do know a few oldsters who now call the various small card based flash media formats "memory chips," which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their "isolinear chips," whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.

Anyway, we do have a limited selection of "phones" without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being "pocket media players," which turns into the rather non-melodious "PMP." (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants "pocket internet media players," and therefore have the opportunity to label these "PIMPs," which is obviously much cooler.)

"Pocket-Sized Portable Computer with Telecommunicative Radio Capability" is quite a long name, people would just get tired of saying that and call it by a simpler name.

Oh wait.

In German, a phone is called a "Handy"

My favorite thing about smartphones is that the "call" icon is an old-school telephone handset. I'll bet younger people have never thought about what that thing is even supposed to be. My second-favorite is the gear icon for "settings" - like, what the fuck does a gear ring have to do with a list of options you can select? That isn't even remotely close to what gears are used for in real-world mechanical devices.

My grandmother said the same when I showed her a Motorola Droid in 2009. She said "that's a pocket computer".

No it's not... Because we know what a cellphone is.

In star trek they called it tapes because they didn't know what they would be called in the future.

Moreover, it's called a cellphone as a colloquial term. They're correct nomenclature is "smartphone".

It's hard for people to understand, but there was a time from the late 70's to early 80's where after a screen "transition" whatever came up next on the screen was called a "new page".

So if you were playing Intellivision AD&D going in a dungeon from the overworld was a "new page". Or playing Karate Champ.... going from the Title Screen to the Fight Mechanics part was thought of as a "new page". Beating the first maze arrangement of Ms Pac Man would bring you to the next maze on "page 2".

What do you call your phone? By its brand?

This sort of icon is still used in software all over the world:

I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I used a floppy disk.

I always liked mobile it works for everything you do on the go

My dad once told me of, IIRC, a Sprint ad wherein the then-president of Sprint came on screen and said something like "you know, with all the things these can do now, it's a wonder we still call them phones." I never saw the ad myself, but it seems to be saying something similar to what you are saying.

It should have been PDAs. For some reason that just didn't catch on.

Is it worse that I still call them "telephones"?

p.s. I am British, which gives me some allowance for using strange, historical words.

We should have immediately called "smartphones" padds.