Dubai-based tech company Eurostar Group knows exactly what women want (apparently. Ed.) and has designed a tablet especially for them – the ePad Femme. Eurostar itself calls the ePad Femme “the first tablet specifically for ladies.”
The ePad Femme is an 8-inch tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and comes pre-loaded with a light pink wallpaper and apps concerning yoga, grocery shopping, and cooking, as shown below.
Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, Mani Nair, Eurostar’s associate vice-president of marketing, said the tablet comes with pre-loaded ‘womanly’ applications so the user can “just turn it on and log in to cooking recipes or yoga”, adding that the ePad Femme “makes a perfect gadget for a woman who might find difficulties in terms of downloading these applications.”
Needless to say, such sexism has hardly been greeted with enthusiasm by women tech writers. For instance, Casey Johnson has a piece on arstechnica entitled “Finally, a tablet simple enough for a woman to use </sarcasm>”.
However, such criticism seems likely to fall on deaf ears in Dubai.