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Comment by skykooler | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of "handy", the German word for "cell phone". My German friend said "we just use the English word for that." I have yet to find an English speaker who calls a mobile phone a "handy".

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In England, if you said "my wife gave me a hnady for my birthday" it would mean something very different :-)

Japan had several cell phone networks using an alternative to GSM called the Personal Handy-phone System. This was an urban only network with extremely small cells that let them make ridiculously small and inexpensive phones.

One of the PHS networks is even still running! You can still get a PHS phone from Y!Mobile (yes, a Yahoo! brand) https://online-store.ymobile.jp/regi/?oid=WX01SH&plan=000K13

What's interesting is that in Europe, DECT was designed to work the same way, but it never caught on as anything aside from a home cordless phone standard. Wikipedia says there was even a public DECT network in Italy until 2001.

There was one in France in 91-97 (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi-Bop), Apple even made a compatible PowerBook 180 with a special antenna (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerbop).

Reminds me of the short-lived Rabbit phone system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_(telecommunications)

At least in Argentina (not sure about other Spanish-speaking countries) "handy" is used for walkie-talkies, but not cell phones. I wonder if it comes from the German use of that word, or if both languages borrowed it from somewhere else.

Checking the Wikipedia article for walkie-talkie just now, it seems the formal name for it is "handheld transceiver", so it makes sense that "handy" would derive from that.

Edit: I was too lazy, scrolling down a bit on the same article mentions and explains the term "hand[y|ie]".

There's also "pendrive", which native speakers call "USB drive".

Pendrive is common across whole English and the non-English speaking world.

There are a hell of a lot of names for them, and I think native speakers of English use a variety: http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/rdcheck.py?p...

I think most native speakers who aren't technical would pick something from that list which probably doesn't have "USB" in it and then wrap it with "little" and "thing" - eg. "little thumb drive thing".

“a USB” is common

As a resident of the English speaking world I'm going to have to disagree with you.

UK and Ireland are pendrive friendly. It is not the most popular word but used here and there - thus I said common.

When talking to some of the US customers they use it as well. It is not as popular as USB stick or Flash drive, but still quite common.

This may be a regional thing. I have not heard the phrase pen drive in ages.

Everyone I know says flash drive or USB stick or thumb drive, roughly in that order of popularity.

For me its USB/USB drive, Flash Drive, Pen Drive and then I hardly hear Thumb Drive at all.

It was pretty common name when USB was new and general population had no clue what it was.

Where? No one in my acquaintance (GTA/SV/NYC) has ever used the term "pen drive".

UK, Ireland, many customers from US/Australia. Many European customers.

Maybe you are talking about tech people. I am talking about mix.

"Handphone" is common in SE Asia, from the literal translation of the Chinese word.

> from the literal translation of the Chinese word

Well, they both refer to hands, I guess. The Chinese word is 手机 shouji "hand machine". "Phone" is 电话 dianhua "electric speech". Those two words aren't related.

Interesting, thanks for the clarification!

"Handphone" is from 手提电话, meaning hand-held telephone.

Also interesting to me in this area was the emergence of the so-called IP卡 ("IP card") referring to pre-paid long distance telephone cards sold within mainland China. These were big business until the mid to late noughties.

In Korea it's called 핸드폰 (pronounced like: hen duh pone). Not sure where it borrowed that from directly though.

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