Hello, Barbie! That is Journalist Barbie reporting dwell from MWC in Barcelona, Spain, about the perfect day ever.
It seems we, the Barbies, are getting our personal telephone. It is pink and sparkly and it has our title on it. The Barbie Flip Cellphone shall be made by HMD — the corporate chargeable for respiratory new life into Nokia telephones — as the primary in a sequence of brand name partnerships it plans to announce over the approaching 12 months.
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HMD is collaborating with Mattel on our telephone, which needs to be obtainable this summer season. We do not know precisely what it will appear to be at this stage, but it surely guarantees to embody the classic stylish of our model heritage, which as you all know stretches again to 1959.
We additionally know that the system shall be a flip telephone that’ll supply an updated-feature-phone expertise, relatively than a smartphone expertise. That is in step with HMD’s dedication to encourage us to leap on the digital-detox pattern. The corporate says that with the Barbie Flip Cellphone, it is offering a brand new choice to Gen Z and millennial telephone customers who’re more and more on the lookout for methods to keep related whereas defending their peace by spending much less time on social media.
Will the Barbie Cellphone look something like this?
The final 12 months has seen so many Barbie model partnerships that it feels not possible to maintain monitor of all of them. From Xbox to Airbnb, services are determined to flaunt our title. It’s totally flattering, however on the similar time we’re getting used to promote an terrible lot of stuff — stuff that not everybody wants.
Bearing this in thoughts, I can not preserve out the massive ideas, like: Is the Barbie Cellphone in a roundabout way commodifying our resistance to doomscrolling? Is there a contradiction in HMD touting sustainability as a core firm worth whereas on the similar time attempting to capitalize on a doubtlessly profitable merchandising partnership which will properly feed into the rampant consumerism that is harming the Earth?
I haven’t got all of the solutions. As Journalist Barbie, I am simply right here to ask the questions. So I did. I spoke with HMD’s chief advertising officer, Lars Silberbauer, who instructed me that the Barbie telephone will not merely be a toy that does not fulfill its goal. It will likely be a totally functioning characteristic telephone that may meet your core connectivity wants, so you’ll be able to name all the opposite Barbies, or Ken, and even Allan (most likely not although).
One of many greatest points inflicting the buildup of e-waste (greater than 5 billion “dormant” telephones are sitting unused in folks’s drawers around the globe) is that many gadgets aren’t constructed to final. That is not the case with the Barbie Flip Cellphone, Silberbauer stated. “It will final a very long time,” he stated.
Many telephone corporations, he added, nonetheless push folks to improve on a yearly foundation, which fuels consumerism. Conversely, the Nokia gadgets that HMD is thought for making are sturdy and “very troublesome to kill.” Those self same requirements will apply to the Barbie Flip Cellphone.
As a journalist who’s been writing about tech for a while now, there’s additionally a part of me that wonders whether or not we Barbies actually need pink, sparkly telephones. It isn’t that I do not like pink, or sparkles (you need to see my dream home). It is simply that not so way back, it was a wrestle to get know-how corporations run by boardrooms filled with males to take girls’s tech wants critically. They used a technique recognized within the promoting world as “shrink it and pink it” as a approach to take a product that was already acceptable for each women and men and use gendered advertising to promote it to girls — usually charging extra within the course of.
Barbie trying trendy in 1959.
Silberbauer fairly pretty identified that there is nothing to say that the Barbie telephone is just for girls. “It is for any form of fan of Barbie,” he stated. The telephone can pay tribute to the “nice fashion” that Barbie has proven over time, with the Mattel and HMD design groups working collectively to make it into the very best product for the individuals who love Barbie.
As we all know, everyone seems to be a fan of Barbie, in order that’s lots of people. However for people who find themselves additionally followers of different issues, HMD guarantees there are extra thrilling partnerships within the pipeline, with the following collaboration coming this spring.
That is all for now, Barbie! Keep tuned for extra (non-Barbie) telephone updates all this week from Cellular World Congress in Barcelona.
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