Pink Blog

I missed the recent New York Times article To Appeal to Women, Too, Gadgets Go Beyond ‘Cute’ and ‘Pink’ (bugmenot required) but that’s probably a good thing, because it annoys me. Except that I’m annoyed now anyway, I was just a month or two late with it.

Only a few years ago, feminizing a consumer electronic product meant little more than creating a pink or pastel version of the same black or silvery item coveted by men. And, some retailers note, that kind of marketing still goes on. But feminizing technology is more about a product’s fundamentals, often expressed in its ease of use. It is not always aimed exclusively at women, but it is female friendly.

If I’m reading this right, the NYT thinks women don’t want their gadgets to be pink, they want them to be dumbed down. What the hell?! How does making something user-friendly make it targeted to women any more than anything else? Oh wait, if it’s too complicated, only men are smart enough to use it? I feel like the damn Geico caveman…complex electronics can only used by men because, what – men are smart? Come on, user-friendly electronics are for everyone!

As much as ShinyShiny and even Engadget decry the proliferation of pink gadgets, I would much rather manufacturers target something to me by changing its color than by dumbing it down.

Sorry I haven’t been posting for the past few days, I’m traveling at the moment! I’ll be back when I get back.

If you want a pink clip-on MP3 player but the pink iPod Shuffle doesn’t do it for you, check out Coby’s MP-C582 pink player. It looks to be easier to manipulate, if harder to keep gripping, than the Shuffle, but it appears to have just about all of the same features – more, even, since it comes with a USB transfer cable! (I was rather surprised to find that everything the 2G Shuffle does is through its headphone port.) Like the Shuffle, it has up to a gig of storage. And at about $30 on Amazon, you can get two of these for the prices of a Shuffle, and still have some money left over for accessories! Not that there are any for the Coby player…but it’s already pink and rugged, what more do you need?

Much like Colorware can paint your electronics any of four shades of pink, Cranium Furniture can paint a number of different pieces of furniture pink as well! They don’t say that you can send in just any old piece of furniture and have them paint it; they have a couple dozen different pieces of furniture that you can choose from, and they can be painted in any color. They also make a round bed with metallic finishes, and they sell a bunch of different colors of bed linen for it, including two shades of pink.

These adorable little sequined flats are only $11 at Buckle.com! Unfortunately they only come in a 6M from what I can tell. They also come in brown but the pink is just so much more fun.

The above shoes are made by a company called Yellow Box, which also makes these cute Bergen sandals that look like butterflies. By the way, even though Zappo’s has the Bergen sandals along with about 200 other Yellow Box styles, they don’t have the Lilly pictured above so if you want it, better grab it now from Buckle.com!

I was on vacation several years ago with some friends, and we were playing at the beach. One of my friends went into the ocean with his wallet in the pocket of his swim trunks. When he realized his mistake, he came back to shore – though by that time it was completely soaked. Fortunately he was able to spread out the money, cards, and everything, and they all dried successfully. Anyone who has ever dropped their phone in the toilet, sink, or other wet place will know that phones don’t always handle a quick swim so well. Sometimes you can leave them out to dry and they will come back to life, but sometimes they are completely dead. The Fujitsu F704i, however, doesn’t mind being submersed in water for up to 30 minutes. It has all the usual features of a modern phone – camera, microSD card, etc – but it has the benefit of taking a dipping and still…um, flipping? (It looks to be a rather clunky flip phone…get it?) Anyway, it’s only available in Japan at the moment, so those of us elsewhere in the world should still be careful where we leave our cell phones.

This is pink champagne, and it also happens to be called Pink. It’s an Australian sparkling wine from Yellowglen, which also makes a standard-color champagne called Yellow. We had the Pink version at my in-laws house not too long ago and I was immediately tickled by the name and I knew I had to post it on Pink Blog even though the bottle isn’t completely pink. (I did see a pink bottle in a liquor store recently; I don’t remember what the product was but I don’t think it was anything blush or rose that would have actually been pink inside too.)

The iPhone accessories are coming! The iPhone accessories are coming! With every new popular portable product, one must have an army of accessories for it. And needless to say, some of those accessories must come in pink. (I don’t consider this part of the supposedly reviled pink gadget trend – if the iPhone itself were pink, that would be a different story, but right now it only comes in black so you buy the accessories in the color you want and then you have a pink product. This Jam Jacket iPhone case comes in four colors and it has an “earbud management system” as you can see in the picture at left.

This cute little drive is by ATP Electronics. It’s about 1.5″ long and has a little loop to put it on a necklace or keychain (although my personal experience is that it’s a pain to have your entire keychain sticking out of your USB slot). It comes in 1GB and 2GB versions; the cheapest place to get it is from Amazon. (Their website pictures a 512MB version on the 1GB version’s page, but I haven’t been able to find the smaller one for sale anywhere.) You can get more specs on the drive at Cnet. And with that little ribbon on it, you had to have known that 10% of proceeds were going to Susan G. Komen for breast cancer research!

If the beanbag chair from earlier tonight didn’t excite you, there’s the Pink Elite Chair for tiny bottoms. It only holds up to 60 pounds, so it really is designed for children, but it looks (to me at least) decidedly more sturdy. It’s on the pricey side at $100, but then again I just featured a cell phone that was also $100, and this will probably last a lot longer! There’s a matching sofa for just $20 more, so your child’s room can be completely outfitted with this lovely pink furniture – although I didn’t have a chair and sofa in my room growing up! (The walls were pink though…Duron’s “Ballerina Pink” to be precise.)