Pink Blog

In 2002, the Japanese company Takara released the Bow-Lingual. Reportedly, this device could tell you if your dog was happy, sad, frustrated, on-guard, assertive, or needy – all based on its bark. In 2003, the company followed up the Bowlingual’s success with the Meowlingual, designed to tell you how your cat was feeling. The product was never successful, though, and it was only ever released in Japan.

But you see, there are a few flaws inherent in this device. For one thing, most dogs say woof woof woof. Cats, however, have a much more broad vocabulary – meeeeeeow, mrrrowt, purrrrrrpurrrrr, mewr, mow, and so forth. Additionally, cats have a greater depth of feeling than the six emotions seen in dogs. They would have to write a translation mechanism that could interpret “if you touch my tail again, I’m going to claw your skin off your face” as well as one that could handle “I don’t CARE if it’s tomato soup, you opened a can and I want what’s in it!” So it’s really no surprise that the Meowlingual did not do very well. Besides, you had to get up close and have the cat meow into the little pink kitty device. And what feline would put up with THAT? The only thing your cat would ever say would be, “get that thing away from me!”

Oh, to live in Japan and speak Japanese! If I did, I would be able to order and use the Hello Kitty microwave oven from Toshiba. It’s a microwave and an oven, with the oven cooking at 1100W and the microwave cooking at 950/1300W which I think is standard here too. It features a “total deodorant” coating inside and weighs about 30 lbs; it costs about $330 but I’d say it’s an essential edition to the kitchen of any Hello Kitty-loving Japanese speaker. (Or whoever can figure out the buttons, since they’re in Japanese.)

Hey! How come this feature isn’t everywhere? It’s a camera that lets you send pictures via wifi to its own website. We can all email our little phone pictures, but those are generally pretty low-resolution these days. This camera packs a very respectable 8MP, so you’ll get huge photos uploaded straight to the web. It doesn’t look like you can do much on the My Picturetown page you upload them too, but it’s a good way to get high quality photos uploaded fast. I’m not too fond of this particular shade of pink, but it is pink! The camera also comes in silver, black, brown, blue, and red; it will run you $450, although you can pick it up from Amazon for about $275. You should be able to find this camera at your local Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, or Circuit City, too.

To me, this little thing is kind of a waste. It’s bigger than an iPod Shuffle, it doesn’t clip onto anything, and it only has 512MB of memory. That’s not nearly enough for most people these days, am I right? But anyway, it’s the MMP8551 audio player from Memorex. I can’t find a price anywhere but hopefully it wouldn’t be more than $50 because it wouldn’t be worth the price if that were the case. There’s not really anything appealing about this one to me…I don’t even like the shade of pink! So like I said, I’m not sure what this is good for, but it’s pink, so here it is!

I don’t know if they have these in Japan, but the United States is having its first-ever Hello Kitty convention: KittyCon 2008! I’ve already recruited a few people to come, and I will definitely be there myself. It’s in Raleigh, NC and it’s about a year away, so you have plenty of time to save your pennies and get your vacation time planned! There will be crafts, socializing, workshops, all kinds of cool stuff! If you will be there please leave me a comment so we can make sure to meet up!

Added: Unfortunately, KittyCon has been canceled due to lack of interest. (If you ask me, it was lack of publicity!)

I’ve never seen one of these before, but apparently it’s a humidifier that you screw onto any bottled water bottle and it humidifies your air! I can’t figure out where to get it, apparently it’s only available in Korea, but GizmoDiva reports that it’s $43. So yeah, I have no idea how it works, but has that ever been a reason not to get a HK product before?!

Yay Dell! Thanks to their new Dell Color site, you can find all their pink products in one place. There are currently 64 pink products, not all of them are actually manufactured by Dell (the Nucleus laptop case is pictured at left) but you can at least get them all in one place! By the way, there are no pink laptops here, this is strictly for accessories. You’ll have to turn to PC Magazine’s article about Dell’s colorful laptops to get more information on the pink Inspiron.

Unfortunately I missed the poll held by Popgadget about the meaning of pink. The choices were “Pink is…empowering; feminine; demeaning; sexy; a fashion statement; just a color.” Personally I would have voted for “just a color” as you might have guessed from my earlier Garmin Nuvi 200 post. According to the results, most Popgadget readers agreed with me – 39% said pink is just a color. There’s also information on the Page Six magazine article about pink – Popgadget’s Mia argued in favor of the color, while Geeksugar’s Heather argued against it.

Guess what, Britain? You get a pink product the United States doesn’t get! I’m talking about the Garmin Nuvi 200, a satellite navigation system for your car. I’m not sure how I feel about the product, though. For one thing, there aren’t a lot of pink cars out there, and there’s not a lot of pink car gadgets, so this Garmin is going to look a little funny on your dashboard until you get more pink stuff. But my main concern is this description straight off the Garmin website:

Smart and stylish, this pink nüvi will guide you with turn-by-turn directions to your favourite boutique or restaurant and fits neatly in your handbag. No matter the colour, the portable, good-looking nüvi looks great on the dash and will show you a good time.

See, I don’t buy into the idea that liking pink means you are automatically a shallow shopaholic bimbo. Liking pink means one thing: you like pink. My family can tell you that I love pink, but this thing would be directing me to geocaches and the nearest computer store. Oh wait, that is shopping. Nevermind, the Garmin Nuvi 200 is great! Hopefully they’ll bring it to the New World soon…

Added: The pink nuvi is now available in the US, only from Best Buy.