I can't believe Google has authorised this. :/

2 the MAXX. HAW HAW look at that girl put on lipstick...WIMP.

How does the quick scene of the banana being obliterated by a circular saw (0:16) fit into this? There must be something going on there.
Also "It's not a princess; it's a robot." A robot? Really? What's that about?

I feel like now I have to go destroy something. brb.

A visual breakdown of this commercial.

0:04. The voice over’s question “Should a phone be pretty?” is visually answered with an effect reminiscent of melting celluloid. The rupture starts on top of the woman’s head, exploding her “pretty” face.

0:06. Women are beheld as dolls.

0:08. Images appear superimposed over images beneath a verbal judgment. The beauty queen (fake) made out of plastic (fake) shown on a television (fake) is definitively stamped “CLUELESS.”

0:10. The commercial erased its first woman by destroying the medium of her representation (supposedly celluloid). The commercial again destroys its second “woman” by destroying the medium of her representation (a television).

0:10 – 0:13. Words across the screen: FAST, RACEHORSE, SCUD. Images: Lightning, racing horse, ripping off duct tape, SCUD missile. Combining these motifs into one single image, we see the SCUD missile flying across the screen with the word RACEHORSE as though it were written with lightning.

0:14. Droid applications: Reality Browser 2.1, Google Sky Map, Qik, Mother TED, CardioTrainer, Where. While I doubt that these applications were developed with the commercial’s themes in mind, their selections reinforce the messages thus far enforced visually: reality (woman of burnt celluloid, destroyed television), sky (SCUD missile), quick (FAST, RACEHORSE), mother (a Freudian slip recognizing the infantile nature of a power fantasy? ^_~), exercise (beef up for manliness stat +4), and going places (which SCUD missiles, race horses, and THE MANLIEST OF MANKIND’S MEN all do).

0:15. Word overlay: DOES. Men do things. Women are pretty and useless.

0:16 – 0:18. Buzz saw cuts banana over a brief yellow outline of a robot.

0:18. Three slim pretty boy models. Again, we see a conflation of all things hitherto condemned: prettiness and effeminacy (designer clothes on fancy-pants, unmuscular pretty boys) and superficiality (plastic people).

0:19 – 0:21. Fruit appears now as a weapon. Hardcore Droid-using man (who is also most likely a fancy, beautiful, professional male model IRL, natch) throws apple at sassy plasticman’s hat, suggesting a Victorian upstart’s rambunctious bucking of all things pretentious with a snowball thrown to knock off a businessman’s hat. Succeeding apples create gore effects.

0:21. Porcelain sheep crushed between the maws of raw, unrelenting MANROBOTPHONE power. Porcelain sheep also conflate all previously condemned messages: prettiness, delicacy, weakness, and artifice.

0:23 – 0:25. Sissy phone explodes into a milky white substance, suggesting ejactulate, with the word NO followed by an image of a woman holding the same ejaculate-phone in her hand with her lips parted. The word PRINCESS is superimposed with glitter effects.

0:25 – 0:27. Layers within mechanical layers give way to reveal the Droid phone. The Droid phone now appears in the palm of a man’s hand. From his POV (deliciously male gaze, yes?), we see him traveling the world at blinding speed (FAST, RACEHORSE) with city lights blitzing past (lightning).

0:28 – 0:29. MANBOT phone breaks through a white, crumbling wall, again conflating the previously condemned ideas (bland superficiality as connoted by white porcelain sheep, white plastic male models, and light pink plastic Miss Pretty).

A PHONE THAT TRADE HAIR-DO

FOR CAN-DO.

I’m guessing that the male models in this video needed a lot more hair-do than vague, half-conceived “can-do” to get the part.

This commercial is formally cogent.

This commercial is a jerk.

Nothing is more masculine than . . . sawing bananas . . and, taping rockets to horses ... and being. . . a robot? Wait, what?

And yet the manly, manly robot-phone looks ... pretty much the same as the pretty princess porcelain phone, just with sharper edges and in black.

That said, "like a racehorse duct-taped to a scud missile fast" is almost funny.

This does, in fairness make some sense. I want a functional phone (i.e. not just a "pretty" casing stuck with diamonds or some shit, and the OS has to be fast and responsive and intuitive). Saying that a phone is functional and fast is a huge draw. Equating those characteristics with masculinity is disappointing, but for marketing purposes will probably serve them very well.

Visceral reactions sell products. I bet these things will fly off the shelves despite the obvious flaws that we see.

I do want one of these phones. It is something about function over style that appeals to me.

The ad does not say masculine over feminine. Y'all are placing your preconceived interpretations of those on this commercial. It is saying function over form (whether that is feminine or not, as in a princess, men with stylish clothes, or whatnot). It is not saying that this wouldn't appeal to women (because, frankly, it does appeal to me).

A lot of these comments are exhibiting the gender/sex confusion thing. Personally, I understand why a phone having the traits society has deemed masculine is a selling point. The commercial doesn't help decouple our constructed masculine/feminine dichotomy from the physical male/female distinction, so it *may* be a jerk, in that it doesn't address the real stereotype problem associated with its imagery.

I think this commercial is actually tamer (in terms of sex stereotyping) than advertisements for take-out restaurants or air fresheners that promise to alleviate the incompetence/smelliness of dense, brutish husbands. In those commercials, the men are *tolerated*, lived with--they are supposed to represent possible people. In the Droid commercial, what is being attacked is an abstracted straw(wo)man, upon which all the negative (for a phone) aspects of femininity have been pinned.

From a technical standpoint, a phone shouldn't be "pretty", at least not at the expense of any other functionality. Unless we're willing to say that prettiness (and the notion of the "feminine" it tends to be attached to) is a trait inherent and exclusive to women, the responsibility and blame is on the viewer for finding sexism in this commercial. I think the "melting celluloid" and "smashed TV" images are especially telling--this commercial is about an abstraction, represented through cliches. The "ah-ha" moment comes at the end... all along, they were talking about a non-living, non-sexual thing: "it's a robot," after all.

Also, the phone features an open source software platform. You can't find something more positively gender-transgressive than open source software--the nerdy, microscopic obsessions we associate with masculinity, but applied to programs that will be shared and open (or vulnerable) to change.

I am in a hospital waiting room and thus had to watch this with the sound off.
I would just like to note that with the sound off, this commercial is the stuff of nightmares.
From a purely visual perspective (I don't know if in the audio, someone is saying "GIRLS ARE STUPID AND BOYS ARE SMART" or whatever), the message seems to be more like "use fruit as a weapon, break stuff, be more like a horse, buy a droid".

This commercial doesn't say that the things it shows the phone as doing are necessarily masculine; it definitely does things I wouldn't do by way of showing certain things associated with femininity as "bad," but I think it's ideology that provides the notion that the inverse is definitionally male, not the commercial itself.

To that extent, I'd be more interested in seeing people talk about how the commercial derogates a SPECIFIC notion of female, one which we might at least admit hasn't been the most productive image for female in our culture.

I think there are probably plenty of arguments to be made that your average bear viewing this commercial would supply the assumption the commercial relies on, that the opposite of princess = male. But the commercial relies on YOU to supply that assumptive inverse. And so there's room in this text to range a little further.

Weird. Duct-taping a horse to a SCUD missile would really only slow down the missile and annoy the horse, not to mention totally throw off the pitch/yaw telemetry and cause it to crash into the ground a few seconds after launch. Hmm... Mayne it's an appropriate metaphor for this phone after all?

Much better would be to tape a missile to a Hummer; it'd be fast (fast enough to write "fast" in italics!), hyper-masculine, and have the double entendre of the word "hummer" as a bonus. The ad was otherwise too whacked-out to try to interpret (at least for me on a Saturday). I think I'd need to be on a lot of Ritalin or Adderall before I could really see it anyway. I watched it, but I couldn't really 'see' it though I was left with the impression that there's yet another over-hyped phone on the market, but that this one doubles as a demolition tool (so it's probably designed for contractors?).

My feminist boyfriend (who may be a feminist but is not terribly interested in sociological interpretation or advertisements and thus usually mutes and buries his head in his laptop) even pointed this one out. IT'S THAT BAD.

Well, have some sympathy for the creative team. It was a tough assignment. The Android phones I've seen are strikingly awkward and ugly, not even considering the competition in Apple's perfect little haiku of a design ("A sleek round case/And a single button:/The sound of ringtone"). "Hang a lantern on your problem," they say on Broadway...

They took the video down but it's available here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bvcb6HXXAE

It's just a commercial. Who cares? If this makes you mad then you must hate Spike TV, with shows like MANswers. How can anyone care about a commercial this much? If you don't like it... just change the channel when it comes on, and don't buy a droid. It's not that big of a deal. How about going do something instead of watching dumb ass TV and blogging about it? Man, some people just look way too into stuff. Just let it go and chill and have fun with your friends. :]

"It’s just a commercial. Who cares?"

This is actually a great case study of why we should care. The hyper-masculine, woman-mocking advertising for this phone has had a direct effect on who is buying them. Check this out:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/190250/android_the_boys_club_of_smartphones.html

"Google's smartphone platform has attracted a disproportionate number of male users, according to a report released today. And lest you think the gender gap is universal to all smartphones, Apple's iPhone actually proved to be quite female-friendly."

So this advertising is working just as described. Mission Accomplished, Google!