Samsung Launches New Phone, Dubbed Tonolith

Yesterday, Samsung announced that it started production on the Galaxy Giant, a 58.3-inch  Android smartphone that stands almost five feet tall. The phone packs a 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor, 16GB of onboard memory, and the usual layer of TouchWiz. Samsung made it clear that “this is not a tablet or television. It’s simply a large smartphone that we know our customers will love.” Cynics, who felt that the “phablet” definition no longer applies, have dubbed the device a “tonolith,” after the large obsidian slab featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Okay, so Samsung might not have released a human-sized smartphone. But they did take the wraps off the Galaxy Mega, yet another child in the ever-expanding family of nebulously-named, nebula-inspired handsets whose sizing has become an arbitrary game of one-upsmanship. The Mega packs a 6.3″ display, but still, somehow, maintains the title of phone. The marketing tagline is rumored to go, “The Samsung Mega: For those of us who wear baseball gloves while on the telephone.”