I don't know about you, but I operate my cell phone with my hands, not my genitals. So I'm not sure why a phone made "for women" would be any different than a phone made for the rest of the human population. But HTC has apparently been holding focus groups with ladies on the younger end of things and trying to score a mobile product that's hip to the ladies. Personally, I'm skeptical of anyone who tries to sell me a certain product just because I've got two X chromosomes. But here's what HTC is thinking. 

The phone, originally codenamed Bliss, now bears the name Glamor, according to a short promo ad that's trickled from the vault. It was originally going to come in a pale greenish color--for its "calming" effect, evidently to soothe our frayed lady nerves--but now it looks like the Glamor has some brighter color options. The back is rubbery so that we can grasp it even with our weak, womanly hands. Come to think of it, my phone has a brightly colored rubber back. It's also called the "Pixi". Maybe I am a victim of gendered marketing. At least Palm was a little more subtle about it than throwing a pink phone called the "Glamor" at me.

HTC's Glamor will feature a touchscreen and no keyboard. There'll be a back camera embedded in the phone's half-inch thickness. As for software, the Bliss mockup included shopping and diet apps. Because the only things women do with their phones besides making calls and texting is consuming and making sure we're not eating too much. You've hit the nail on the head, HTC. My life would be better with a calorie counting application built into my phone. Because I'm not happy until everything I own boasts features that tell me I'm fat. 

There's no word yet as to how many of the Bliss mockup features will carry over to the Glamor. The Bliss evidently featured a cell phone charm feature--a silly trend that I thought had died while I was in high school. The Glamor probably won't have light-up dongles attached, but HTC does certainly seem to be trying to probe the female demographic as they understand it. It just seems so far that their understanding is limited to some pretty shallow stereotypes. You don't need to make a phone pink to get women to buy it. Every woman I know has a cell phone. None of their phones are pink or girly. None of them use diet apps. Just make a good phone with gender-neutral functionality and you will sell to both male and female customers. These attempts at gendering as-of-now ungendered gadgets just make you look foolish as a company. It's a cheap gimmick and a strange move on the part of HTC, whose recent forays into Android smartphone territory have been really quite successful. Maybe they haven't been selling to female customers quite as well as the more stylish Apple, but going the route of slapping cheap pink rubber on the back of a phone isn't going to put them up there with the iPhone.