'Floral Kiss'... More like Awful Diss

Do the sort of Barbie-girls portrayed in soft-core pornography actually exist? Clearly the management of Fujitsu believe in this fantasy otherwise they would not have just announced Floral Kiss, the most preposterously stereotypically ultra-feminine computer invented since Look Around You's Petticoat 5.

The 'bimbo' like the fictitious audience for this laptop is largely a male fantasy creation. Do the sort of Barbie-girls portrayed in soft-core pornography actually exist? Clearly the management of Fujitsu believe in this fantasy otherwise they would not have just announced Floral Kiss, the most preposterously stereotypically ultra-feminine computer invented since Look Around You's Petticoat 5.

Let's start with the name, 'Floral Kiss' - I just hope it's a mistranslation and that the translator has been duly punished. But assuming that's not the case I certainly get the 'floral' bit. The laptop and its many applications have a floral theme.

But what about this kiss? Are we expected to kiss the flowers, or is it that these flowers somehow resemble a kiss? I do not know (its confusing and weird) and I doubt Fujitsu know - they just made up a girly sounding name in the hope that girls who don't know any better buy their laptop. A lot of stuff from Japan aimed at little girls makes very little sense - have you ever watched an episode of Hello Kitty? This is kind of the same thing.

This product is cynically marketed to younger women whom Fujitsu presume to not know any better. It's a low-end laptop featuring Intel's mid-range i5 processor. The manufacturer's specs do not mention the quantity of memory or the resolution of the screen. They do mention that it runs Windows 8 and has a pretty, jewel encrusted gold-plated caps-lock button.

But forget about the specs, just look at the colours: 'Elegant White', 'Luxury Brown' and 'Feminine Pink' - again we must wonder about the word-associating abilities of Fujitsu's team of female designers. Yes, Pink has feminine associations, and white can be elegant but as a mother of two I've come to associate brown with other qualities outside the realm of luxury. I suspect that even Fujitsu's mighty marketing machine will not be able to entirely re-brand brown.

While this range of laptops is not exclusively pink, here we see one of the most common gambits from the marketing to women playbook: "Pink it and Shrink it." The idea is to take the guts from last year's model. Make it a tiny bit smaller, or possibly reduce the quality of the components and then wrap it up in a girly colour. Add a sparkle or two, and you suddenly have next year's ladies model.

But does this approach work? Studies have shown that only younger women with lower disposable income prefer their technology pinked-up and dumbed-down. Most women want the same thing that men want - a reliable machine that's not embarrassing to be seen with. I expect that Fujitsu will learn the hard way that this is just not the way to market to women.

It's hard to review a laptop like Fujitsu's new 'Floral Kiss' without swearing. The polite English vocabulary does not have words for just how awful this machine is. Fujitsu have managed to play to all of the negative stereotypes of women and technology in a single product. Their new laptop is pretty, pink sparkly and even comes with a horoscope app? It's a toy laptop from Polly Pocket's dream-castle.

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