Now You Know Centro Book Released

On the same day we post this piece on the new NYK Centro book and its unfortunate semi-misogynistic, male-pandering choice of cover text ("snap a pic of that hottie at the bar"), Palm updates their corporate blog with a bunch of pomp & circumstance about attracting female users. If this doesn't merit a "GIGGLE", I don't know what does!

"It also helps that smartphones like the Palm Centro are sleeker and sexier than ever before – coming in smaller form factors and a wide range of cool colors"

P.S. This is all garbage. I DEMAND a larger/higher-resolution screen in a non-Apple CDMA device. Everything else is pure fluff!

P.P.S. I can tell bawdy jokes, stories etc. with the best of 'em. But I'm not heading up anyone's marketing/PR campaign! And for a Palm-sanctioned/assisted book that's essentially a glorified user's manual, this is sending out one type of message that's in direct contrast to what the Centro is supposedly doing (broadening Palm's demographics/marketshare) & what Colligan & the Palm blog are preaching.

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For a REAL blast from the past, let's turn the wayback machine to 1999 and Palm's controversial Palm V ad campaign....the one with the "nekkid" women-remember that one?

We've gone from at least some pseudo-intellectual mubbo-jumbo, art-for-art's sake, ad campaign from the heady tech bubble days (for the Palm V,a truly revolutionary device) espousing the elegance of the female form to THIS: simple barfly chatter for the 20-something/ADD generation/can't-afford-an-iPhone-yet/fratboy/playa mentality types targeted to sell Palm's dayglo-colored kiddie smartphone (Centro).

Doesn't Palm seem like a VERY unlikely choice to be repeatedly involved in sexist advertising scandals?

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/3Compalm.html

A choice excerpt:

Simply Bulls**t: 3Com Replies
Half the fun of a confrontation such as this is how the corporate talking heads reveal themselves after the fact. Here - if we had any doubt before - we learn that to 3Com women are merely objects, kind of like a bowl of fruit, to represent sex to sell their product to be used as a backdrop.

Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for your candid feedback on our advertising campaign for the Palm V organizer. Your comments are welcome and will be forwarded to our marketing team.
We would like to take this opportunity to clarify the Palm Computing position on this campaign.
The female image in the advertisement is designed to draw a parallel between the elegant design of the Palm V product and the elegance of the human form. We wanted to infer that great design involves both the aesthetics of an object as well as how that object functions or performs. In the case of the dancers image, the human form is the backdrop to the Palm V organizer and not the focus of the ad. The simplicity of the imagery and the "Simply Palm(superscript: TM)" headline are meant to reflect the simplicity that is the cornerstone of our product design philosophy and a key factor in our success.
There will be other ads in the "Simply Palm" series in upcoming months that will feature other beautiful objects to illustrate this same concept.
We hope this helps to put a context around the campaign. Again, thank you for sending us your comments

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