At long last, a company has designed a tablet fit for the use of an entire gender that has, thus far, apparently gone unserved. The ePad Femme, designed and distributed by the Eurostar Group, is an eight-inch tablet that comes pre-loaded with apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking. Thank the heavens, ladies may never trouble their pretty heads with such difficulties as finding and downloading their own apps ever again.
The tablet was first announced back in October but received a marketing push in February as “the perfect Valentine’s Day gift,” noted one site. The tablet runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, or as a woman might call it, “the Android screensaver.” Eurostar calls the ePad Femme "the first tablet specifically for ladies."
Several sites highlight that the tablet “comes in light pink.” Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to find an image verifying that the actual body of the tablet is pink, so we assume this is in reference to the home screen wallpaper. Just as well, since what woman is going to figure out how to configure that, am I right? Settings, right? What even are they?
Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Eurostar associate vice president of marketing Mani Nair said that the tablet comes with the preloaded womanly applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga.” He went on to state that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications and it is a quick reference.”
The tablet has a 1.5GHz processor, 16GB of internal storage, and an SD card slot, but how a woman will ever work out either of those last two things are or what to do with them, one can’t be sure. She shouldn’t even need to—that clothing size converter app she was going to download? Already installed. Pregnancy app? Look no further.
Nair maintains that the intent of the ePad Femme tablet was not sexist. He compared it to another tablet the company offers, ePad Gamer, but those gamers are targeted by their interest, not their biological makeup. That seems like a pretty substantial difference.
A second interviewee of the Jerusalem Post, Dee Ann Javier, describes how her boyfriend did indeed give her an ePad Femme for Valentine’s Day. Surprisingly, her story does not begin “I broke up with my boyfriend because.” Instead, Javier notes the tablet’s “portability” and that she likes the color.
But a feminist blogger, Eman Al Nafjan, notes to the Jerusalem Post that women in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where the tablet is sold, are “extremely tech-savvy” and don’t need apps downloaded for them. Women in those countries “spend a lot of time online.” They may work less but graduate from universities at higher rates than men, so they are just as well if not more educated.
We’ve taken down the pinkification of gadgets before, and the sexist marketing and targeting that goes along with them (sexism also goes in the other direction, with the hyper-masculine bent of brands like Motorola’s Droid phones). Not only does the ePad Femme continue this sorry tradition, but it takes it further. The ePad Femme bores into the functionality of the tablet itself, assuming that a women’s interests fit neatly into the stereotypical categories of fitness, weight loss, cooking, shopping, and having children.
The ePad Femme costs only $190, far less than the iPad and about the same as a Nexus 7. Go figure, the device has yet to be a big seller—as of mid-February, Eurostar had sold around 7,000 units. Given the number of affordable, gender-neutral, and yet still user-friendly tablets available, we are unsurprised.
Perhaps we go too far in assuming that these tablets are indeed only suited to a woman’s needs. Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently hit us with the revelation that smartphones are emasculating; maybe a pink tablet with a pregnancy app can do no worse.
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