“A branding opportunity staring them right in the face.”

Apple is gearing up to begin production of its new smart watch this month, a device that has stoked anticipation since reports about it first appeared nearly a year and a half ago. The gadget could be on wrists as soon as October, and one expert has already estimated that Apple could ship 50 million units in 2015.

The big question so far isn’t so much what the new toy will do. The wearable computer is expected to have many smartphone features, such as email and a touchscreen, as well as the health-monitoring capabilities of the latest fitness wristbands.

The question is, what will it be named?

Of course, many have already assumed the new device will be dubbed the iWatch. It’s a decent enough guess. The thing will be watchish, after all. Just slap on that lowercase “i” prefix that has been part of the rote Apple naming formula for well over a decade, the one that brought us such bestselling toys as the iPhone and iPad, and you’ve got a name.

The iWatch isn’t a terrible name. Notably, it may the first Apple product name that is also a full English sentence, and that’s something.

But there’s also something sadly dull and literal about the name iWatch. It’s utterly predictable. It’s a watch, but Appleized. We get it.

Apple cannot afford to be predictable these days. Following the death of its former chairman and CEO, Steve Jobs, and the success of challengers such as Samsung in the smartphone game, the California-based firm is battling the perception that it has turned from visionary leader to follower. And in the nascent but fast-growing field of wearable computers, many other firms have already debuted a version of the smartwatch, from small startups to Google.

Much is riding on the splash that could be made by Apple’s version. And ever since Apple first threw that petite “i” in front of its music-playing Pods, the naming of gadgets has been very important.

For better naming inspiration, the tech giant might look to the original wrist phone — that worn by comic-strip detective Dick Tracy.

In the 1940s, when the famed fedora-sporting gumshoe first spoke into the 2-Way Wrist Radio to communicate with other hard-boiled policemen, the imaginary technology became iconic. Dick Tracy’s wrist radio eventually evolved into a wrist TV, showing the direction of things to come.

Maybe that’s why the idea of Apple making a watch phone has a deep sense of rightness to it. In the comic strip, the watch radio was invented by a gifted young character named Brilliant; today, Apple is arguably synonymous with American genius. A long-lost revered object of wonder in the American esthetic is about to be remade by a powerful U.S. company in the computer age. Back then, that two-way communicator fit perfectly among the lovely bits of U.S. modern design flourishing over the past few decades, from sleek skyscrapers to classic radios. This time, the watch phone won’t be part of the realm of fantasy and comic books, but reality.

The Dick Tracy theme affords plenty of marketable names. Consider the iTracy. Potential copyright disputes aside, the iTracy has a smooth, retro, film noir slickness. After all, not even Warren Beatty’s cartoonish version of comic artist Chester Gould’s character has diminished his appeal.

The iDick, though. Ah, now there’s a name.

If the brains at Apple don’t name their smartwatch the iDick, they can’t sense a branding opportunity when it’s staring them right in the face.

Nor have they any sense of what many male owners of personal devices with wee cameras tend to use them for. With a wearable, one could take some very distinctive pics. Just think of the crowdsourced marketing possibilities.

(Okay, I’m done. Promise.)

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Not convinced? Fine. There are plenty of other dull, literal names. Call the thing the iClock, the iTime, the iWrist. Just not the iWatch. No matter what it’s named, the last thing a company would want to do as it unveils a product is meet our expectations exactly — no more, no less, with nary a surprise in sight.

Sticking with the it-might-be-an-English-sentence theme, how about the iWear? The iCall? The iLate?

Or, to inaugurate a new era of Apple products, they could lose their “i” completely. (It’s all fun and games until that happens, I’ve heard.) It isn’t just any watch — it’s Watch.

These are all terrible ideas. Absolutely awful. But the iWatch is worse — it’s boring. What’s the point of unveiling a device if we already know what it’s called? Apple is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. That gives it at least a billion dollars to invest per letter of its new gadget’s name. Come on, Apple, don’t let the world name your device for you.

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