We set out earlier this week on a CrackBerry quest to give a more fitting name to BlackBerry's asterisk-on-circle notification icon than "splat", which is the nickname it has been referred to in the past internally by Research In Motion employees.
Hundreds of suggestions later, we narrowed it down to the best five and then we put it to a vote by CrackBerry Nation. The winner? Drum roll please.... the icon formerly known as the Splat is now known as the Spark! Congrats go to CrackBerry member black.rhino for suggesting this one. The voting was pretty split between the finalists, but Spark took the leading winning by a margin over double the next runner up. We'll be hooking up black.rhino up, as well as the other finalists, with some spending cash at ShopCrackBerry.com for their creativity. Nicely done!
So that's that. If you're a Research In Motion employee reading this, be sure to spread the word that the Splat is now the Spark! It's fitting too - a spark sets off a chain of events, and this symbol definitely does just that - seeing it on your phone is the spark that ignites your thumbs into a messaging blaze.
Now we know not all of you reading this were fans of the suggestions - we knew that would be the case, and that's fine. And we also knew, as many of you pointed out, it's not even that big of a deal that a symbol like this have a name. Most of us, myself included, have gone years without giving any thought to what this symbol was called. Afterall, most normal BlackBerry icons don't have names. And even now knowing that it has a name, it's not like it's one you're going to be putting into regular use all that often. Honestly, the only time it enters conversation is when you're talking about the graphic specifically, as we are doing in a post like this. But still, we like to finish what we start here on CrackBerry... splat needed some rebranding.. so we followed this one through to the end. Long live Spark!
The bottom line: It really doesn't matter what you call the icon. Call it spark, splat, noti, nova, burst, splash, star, asterisk or whatever you want, what matters is what it means, and this BlackBerry symbol means ACTION!
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