Preliminary name

Oftentimes, a product goes through a name change before hitting stores. This can be for a variety of reasons - the preliminary name was deemed not good enough or better suited for something else, the preliminary name was not a name at all but a description that made it easier for the developers to talk about it, the preliminary name was not necessary as product name and not marketing it as such saved trademark costs.

There are a few ways that preliminary names can reach the fans:
 * Rejected trademarks - When a trademark is filed, there's always a chance it will be rejected because it is either not specific enough a word, phrase, or symbol, or too similar to a trademark of another person or company. Since all filed trademarks are published just for the purpose of getting people to notice in case their intellectual property is infringed on, filed trademarks are there for all too see, even if they end up useless to the one that filed them. It does, however, not often occur that a trademark is rejected, because filing them takes time and money so usually there is some research done into a trademark's viability prior.
 * Repurposed trademarks - It might happen that a company files a trademark only to find that, in hindsight, it's not what they want for the product. Thus a new trademark is filed. The old one may be abandoned or used for another product.
 * Early advertisement - Before a product is made and shipped, the stores that are to carry the product are approached with design ideas and prototypes to see if they are interested. Preliminary material thus ends up in the hands of other companies. When it is time for them to prepare advertisement and set up pre-orders, it might happen that preliminary material ends up used for this rather than the definite material.
 * Early media - Especially if the media that is to support the product is developed alongside the product, chances are that preliminary material ends up written into them and not corrected before publication.
 * Interviews - The developers say that a product had a preliminary name and disclose what that name is.