You're reading: Gadget Guru: Gadgets are a girl’s best friend

Nobody knows what women want, especially when it comes to cutting-edge technology.

While men are often eager to dive into the vast ocean of possibilities that the latest gadgets provide, women tend to stick to simple solutions and care about form much more than content.

For many years, manufacturers thought exactly this way: Phones for women should be simple (no smartphones!) and pink. As for laptops, it wasn’t possible to make them simpler than the operating systems already were. So the laptops should just be pink.

It was not until iPhone’s entry in 2007 that manufacturers started to feel that women also want to browse the web, check emails or chat using their phones. Smartphones became simpler to use, and the era of plain pink gadgets came to an end. Yet some of them are still out there.

Kyiv Post presents a small guide to help ladies decide what they want.

 

Apple iPhone and iPad
Women love Apple products – perhaps because they are so glossy. Or maybe it’s the other way around with Steve Jobs insisting on their exquisite look because he wants to attract female buyers.

It doesn’t matter if the frame’s made of glossy plastic or glass as with the latest iPhones and MacBook or aluminum iPad and MacBook Pro, women make up at least half of all buyers of Apple products.

That’s a good result considering that other companies mainly aim their gadgets at geeks and nerds. For example, 75 percent of Android users (a competing operating system for mobile devices made by Google) are men.

Apple’s operating system, called iOS, is so simple to use that the company decided not to release a huge manual with it. There is only one button and only one Settings menu. Installation of software doesn’t require any special knowledge.

So for women Apple is the king of gadgets. And as for a pink question – well, Apple is like a huge shark accompanied by myriads of suckerfish. There are thousands of companies that produce accessories for iPhone and iPad or MacBook. And there are plenty of pink cases among their products.

Samsung La Fleur

Korean electronics giant Samsung targets their La Fleur phones for women who consider themselves “smart and beautiful.” The phone series has three models. Two of them are smartphones based on the newest Bada platform that supports multitasking and software installations from the Samsung Apps online store – that’s what business women can take advantage of. Women that care about looks can enjoy an exquisite design with a nice flower pattern on the front and back panels.

Both Bada smartphones (Wave 723 and Wave 525) can easily provide their owners with Internet access (including WiFi). Wave 723, which is more expensive ($210), also supports GPS navigation and has a five-megapixel camera with a flash.

Samsung La Fleur phohes

The camera can’t be a substitute to a usual digital camera, but the quality will be good enough to share simple snaps of, say, your cat with your friends.

The Wave 525 ($175) has a mediocre 3.2 megapixel camera. All cats might look the same on its photos.

The third of the La Fleur breed – the cheapest E2530 model – is a simple clamshell phone with a black exterior and red interior. You don’t always need smartphone capabilities, says Samsung. A phone is made for talking, isn’t it? So that’s what you can do with a fancy but quite affordable E2530 – talk, talk and talk. No GPS, no WiFi, a plain 1.3 megapixel camera that might make your cat look like a main character from last year’s Predators movie. But who cares? It’s just a phone.

Pink laptops

What if you are smart and beautiful at the same time but when it comes to laptops you still prefer them in pink? And you don’t want to pay more for expensive MacBook or simply prefer the good old Windows platform?

Sony is by no means less stylish and fancy than Apple, but has a bunch of pink laptops. For example, the new C series include a 13.3 inch model encased in pink aluminum. Even its touchpad is pink. The laptop weighs only 1.8 kilograms, has 3G network connectivity and can work as long as nine hours without recharging. You can get this pink miracle for $900. There is more affordable model (also pink) without 3G and with a much less powerful processor for $550.

Dell pink laptop

A netbook from Dell, another major PC manufacturer, can also add a touch of pink to your life. You can get Inspiron 1018, a portable 10 inch model for $330. Not much computing power under the hood, but smart and beautiful women don’t always need to edit streaming video or render 3D images on the run, right? Inspiron is good enough to check your email while drinking coffee in a nice cafe.

There are a couple more powerful Dell laptops available in red and pink. But probably not many women would want to carry a huge 15-inch laptop weighing more than 2.5 kilograms.

Less well-known manufacturers from Taiwan – Acer, ASUS – also offer a number of models in red and pink. Nothing special there. It’s not only color that matters. After all you can paint a tank in pink, but women will still prefer a small and fancy car.

That’s what Samsung engineers finally understood. The latest Samsung Notebook 9 Series, despite its black color, looks like a thin paper folder. Women will definitely like it. These laptops are thinner and more powerful than the latest MacBook Air. Selling for $2,000, it’s pricey, but no business lady will resist this beautiful and powerful creature. This is definitely what women want.


Kyiv Post news editor Alexey Bondarev can be reached at
[email protected]