Samsung
A400

The A400 (model number: SGH-A400) was a phone designed by Samsung targeted at women. At launch it was marketed as the “Ladyphone”. It came with a range of features that Samsung believed would be ideally suited to female consumers including a biorhythm calculator, a “fatness index” that provided a user’s height-to-weight ratio, and a calorie calculator that estimated calories burned for “everyday activities such as shopping, cleaning and cooking”. Excerpt from Samsung A400 instruction manual The bio rhythm calculator was designed to help users anticipate how they would feel “physically, emotionally and intellectually” in the next 24 hours based on their date of birth. The phone also had a menstrual cycle app which Samsung called the “Pink Schedule” that would estimate the timing of a woman’s next ovulation, period and fertility period (referred to as “pregnancy probability”) based on entering the date of a recent period and the normal length of cycle. Samsung cautioned that the information provided was not suitable for birth control purposes. Such a device, and its accompanying proposition, would now be highly inappropriate, but even in 2001 when it was launched, it raised eyebrows and was an indication of Samsung executives being out of step with women’s expectations for technology. The A400 was offered in multiple colours comprising pearl white, metallic blue, ruby red and jet black.