Hasta La Gadget!

Your mom was right: Nobody likes a tattletale. The telltale network light on the Dell Latitude 2100, a kid-friendly netbook, is one of the worst: It lights up whenever you’re connected to the internet.

Supposedly that’s so your teacher will know that you’re actually working on some low-res educational game and not, you know, actually learning something.

Fortunately, Wired.com’s Michael Calore figured out how to disable the Latitude 2100’s narc light. All you need is a guitar pick (to pry the case open) and a skinny screwdriver (to disconnect a ribbon cable). Oh, and a willingness to void the computer’s warranty. Squeeze the case back together and you can cruise the internet all you want, without the light going on.

Just remember, anyone behind you can still tell when you’re online just by looking at your screen. The browser window showing YouTube videos is a dead giveaway.

Disable the Dell Latitude 2100’s Wi-Fi Light [Wired How-to Wiki]

UPDATED 8/21: Added a note that, as noted in the How-to Wiki, this will void your computer’s warranty.

Women buy a lot of gadgets, but it’s easy for us to feel invisible in the world of consumer electronics. Gadgets — not to mention gadget blogs — often seem overwhelmingly marketed towards males. And that’s too bad, because the electronics industry is missing a big opportunity.

Although women spend less than men on gadgets overall, we are still a very significant class of consumers. Nearly 40 percent of spending in consumer electronics comes from women, says the NPD group. Other estimates are much higher. Women account for about 85 percent of all consumer purchases and represent the majority of shoppers online.

Yet gadget companies seem to find it difficult to design, produce and market products to women without resorting to stereotypes. The current strategy among most gadget makers is that if it is for women, it must be pink or sparkly.

Recently, I got an e-mail from ChicBlvd, a company that create electronics products for women. The Vista, California-based company, which was started by two women, said it has earphones and iPod cases that are available in colors such as Bubble Gum and Pomegranate Purple and studded with Swarovski crystals.

“All pieces are created for a woman’s needs in mind: a woman on-the-go looking for fashion, function and convenience in their electronics,” says the company in its press release.

So far so good. But a look through the company’s website and I was horrified. The earphones are sparkly, shiny and seem to play into every stereotype of products designed for women. The Love Buds earphones, for instance, have little hearts studded with crystals.

ChicBlvd is quite clear with its messaging. These are products, apparently favored by celebrities, and for women who want to look like celebrities.

Sure, Paula Abdul may love these ear phones, but is this really what women want from gadget manufacturers?

Want another example of how gadgets are made for women today? Take the Asus Eee PC 1005HA-V Seashell. It’s painted a Pepto Bismol pink. Unfathomable as it may be to these companies, I would bet a majority of adult women don’t want to carry a sugary pink PC to work.

If you think pink and sparkly strategy is lazy, so is slapping a designer label on a product for women and pricing it much higher than similar products. HP Vivienne Tam netbook, I am looking at you. The netbook hit some of the right notes. It’s a pleasant red, has a stylish exterior and comes with a matching Vivienne Tam designed clutch. But for those perks, women have to shell out $700, much more than the $350 for a comparable HP black or blue netbook.

There’s a raging debate among the digerati on diversity in technology and if women get fair representation when it comes to opportunity to speak at conferences and other tech events. When it comes to consumer electronics, I can say, women are a misunderstood and neglected community.

Designing and creating products for real women shouldn’t be so difficult. Real women want stylish products. They want products that are fashionable, competitively priced and easy to use. And marketing tricks such as MSI’s ‘boys catching a laptop with their butt‘ isn’t going to help send the right message.

There are a few companies, such as headset maker Jawbone, who get it right. Jawbone’s Bluetooth headsets are very well-designed, come in some gorgeous colors and there’s no differential pricing between the same product for men and women. And have you seen a Jawbone ad? It’s beautifully conceptualized, reminiscent of a high fashion photo shoot and, I would be willing to bet, irresistible in its appeal to most women.

Another example is Apple. Their advertising is catchy, their products are stylish and come in colors, which while vivid, don’t ever tip over into tween territory. A recent poll by SRG seems to agree, rating Apple as the top brand among women.

Dell is also taking a a step in the right direction. Dell’s latest netbooks come with some really nice designs, finishes such as rubber and choice of colors. And the company’s new ad that wraps notebooks like candies is sure to be liked as much by women as by men.

So it can’t be that difficult to create gadgets for women. Leave your prejudices at the door and think outside the pink, sparkly, shiny stereotype.

Photo: ChicBuds/ChicBlvd

The top comment on Gadget Lab last week was posted by senor_demasiado, on my post about the Zune HD.

“What’s with the smug comments about microsoft?” senor_demasiado asks. That’s a response to my question about what kinds of video you’d want to store on your Zune, then display on your hotel room’s widescreen TV. What kind of video, you ask? Think of the children, he says: Such videos are indispensible for entertaining the wee ones on long trips.

And then there’s always the “tech for tech’s sake” argument:

“Why would you want to plug your Zune into a TV?… I bet 10 years ago, people would ask, “why would someone want to put a video camera on a phone”? The answer is always the same for these questions; Because it doesn’t have one now, or just Because.

Good point, senor_demasiado. Why ask why? New features, in all their purity, are the Gadget Lab’s reason for being. Useful, useless, or just plain awesome, we love writing about them, especially if we can also use them to entertain our kids. So you want to put HDMI out capabilities on a media player? Hell yeah! We’ll find a use for it, somehow.

The comment-of-the-week prize is a Leatherman Freestyle CX (above), one of the smallest tools Leatherman makes. It’s got a pair of pliers and a hard, 154CM stainless steel blade, and that’s about it. It fits nicely in your pocket, feels good in your hand and looks cool. Thanks very much to the Leatherman company for donating these as prizes.

A close runner-up last week was Rob Beschizza’s comment comparing fanny packs to Atlantis: “The problem with fanny packs is the same as the problem with Atlantis: as soon as you make the proposition reasonable, it becomes something else entirely.” Unfortunately, Rob, as the former editor of Gadget Lab and the gadgets editor for BoingBoing — aka “Wired’s paramilitary wing” — has been disqualified from winning. Instead, I am going to send him a consolation prize: the iPhone case I got at the GDGT party last week.

There is one more week to win a prize, so keep those comments coming. And as a reminder, here’s the Gadget Lab comment policy.

“Our friends call us The Shack”. So claims the newly rebranded RadioShack in an attempt to be down with the kids. It’s almost embarrassing, like seeing your grandfather listening to an iPod and riding a single speed track bike. Wait, that actually would be cool.

The rebranding is part of a big Netogether promo (giant laptops and webcams. Sounds like fun) for the company and strikes us as being on a level with the recent Pizza Hut scheme, which renamed itself as The Hut (eat there and you’ll end up looking like Jabba). Sure, the store probably doesn’t sell as many radios as it did back in 1921, but a name is more than a description of a company, right?

Back at the beginning, brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann chose the name for their first downtown Boston store because it referred to the big wooden boxes that contained a ship’s radio kit, and that’s what they were selling. If the retailer was that honest today, perhaps the chain should be called JunkShack?

Still, it’s better than the fate of Tandy, the UK version of RadioShack. The stores disappeared and even the url redirects to some shabby-looking online shop called “UK Stores”. What a way to go.

The Shack Summer Netogether [RadioShack]

Photo: Caveman 92223/Flickr

This is the Axixa, and here in Barcelona, we need it. The ceramic, water-stain shaped device is a public urinal. It even comes in pee-yellow.

Public urination is a big problem in my hometown: hordes of drunken tourists, all filled up with nowhere to go. Bars won’t let you use the restrooms unless you are a customer, there are almost no public toilets (a few porta-potties at the beach is about the size of it), and because the locals have some taste, there aren’t even many branches of McDonald’s, the default public bathroom for much of the world.

The Axixa is a design by Mexican Miguel Melgarejo, and could be deployed cheaply and easily on any city wall. Inside there is a traditional U-bend water trap leading to a drainage pipe. The outside could actually be any shape, but a yellow streak of piss seems appropriate enough. But would people use them? If you are desperate enough to pee in the street anyway, we doubt you’d be too embarrassed to use the Axixa instead. I just hope that the local government sees this and turns the design from concept into reality.

Axixa, a hygienic way of peeing on the walls [The Design Blog]