This One’s for the Ladies: Verizon & HTC Unveil a Female-Targeted, Purple Android

This one's for the ladies: Verizon & HTC

Every couple years, we womenfolk get a pink or purple gadget made especially for us; this time around, it’s HTC’s new Rhyme. 

As announced today by HTC execs, the phone will retail for $199 with a Verizon contract and sports a 3.7-inch screen, a 1GHz processor, and a 5-megapixel rear camera. 

In other words, it would be a perfectly standard Android handset, except for the fact that it’s purple, features a stable of feminine wallpaper options, and comes with a light-up charm. 

According to recent research, between 73 and 63 percent of Android owners are men. In one survey, males showed a preference for Android, women in the same study showed a strong preference for the iPhone — something that we attribute entirely to marketing.

So Verizon and HTC apparently thought a female-targeted phone and marketing campaign would help bring new consumers into the Android fold. 

The Rhyme will not support Verizon’s 4G LTE service, but it will come in a bundle with the aforementioned charm (also purple, it is designed to clip to your purse and comes with an LED that flashes when you have a notification), a speaker dock and matching purple earbuds. 

While we do understand that the Android OEM community might want to tap into the female demographic to extend their reach, we’re not sure a purple, light-up phone with mid-range specs and girlie wallpaper is the right way to do that. 

In fact, it might take an even greater commitment: several years of gender-neutral marketing that emphasizes features everyone can use and enjoy rather than Verizon’s current Android marketing, much of which positions the device at the center of a dystopian machine shop. 

The HTC Rhyme will be available for pre-order starting September 22. 

HP employees to get 'last chance' at TouchPads starting Sept. 28

HP earlier said that it would be building and releasing a new run of TouchPads, its soon-to-be late, but perhaps not too lamented webOS tablets, but did not say exactly when, although it said it would be sometime in HP's fiscal Q4 2011, which ends October 31.

With an announcement that the TouchPad will be returning to its EPP, can that new set of TouchPads be far away?

According to employees who have been sent an email by Stephen Dewitt, Stephen DeWitt, SVP & GM of HP webOS global business unit PSG (Personal Systems Group), the company will release a final batch of HP TouchPads to employees starting September 28th at 9:00 a.m. PDT. The pricing for the tablets will be the same as the fire sale prices ($99 for 16GB, $149 for 32GB) that spurred the demand that HP wanted at its original prices.

TouchPads will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis, with only one TouchPad per employee (not one of each storage tier). Orders may take as long as 10 days to ship due to warehouse load. Orders will only be taken via the online EPP store, no phone orders.

One might expect that a number of these will end up on eBay. A number of TouchPads are selling on the online auction site for $200 instead of the $99 fire sale price for the 16GB model, meaning a 100 percent profit for a seller who managed to get one at the low, low price.

Although HP's earlier statement indicates that regular consumers should be able to get their own opportunity at the next run of TouchPads, it's unclear if that set of devices is already spoken for by those who managed to get unfulfilled orders in at the fire sale prices.

That said, we would recommend that folks start looking closely at sites such as HP's online store, Best Buy and Amazon.com in the days just prior to and just following Sept. 28.