World reacts to ‘gender fluid’ phone

Korean electronics giant Samsung has been immediately mocked online after a livestreamed event that saw the brand announce a swathe of new products.

But not every one was happy.

Samsung announced three new smartphones, a new smartwatch, two new tablets, and a pair of wireless earbuds, but it was The Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra the first to cop it.

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Samsung experimented with a new livestream format, necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, to project a massive scale model of the Note 20 that was immediately mocked online.

Others roasted Samsung's introduction of the phone's colour schemes, which is available in a variety of colours including bronze, grey, green, white and black, all with "Mystic" as a prefix.

But in describing the different colours Samsung made a strange characterisation.

The definition of gender fluid (or non-binary) is of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity is not fixed. In other words, they don't identify as either male or female.

Notable examples include Australian actor Ruby Rose.

The Wall Street Journal's technology columnist Joanna Stern said the phrase was "not a phrase I'd ever thought I'd hear in a Samsung phone launch".

Another said: "Didn't see that coming".

Samsung also introduced some new wireless earbuds to compete with the market dominating AirPods, featuring a bold new jelly bean style design that has also inspired comparisons.

While plenty of people tuned into the livestream (at one point more than 455,000), not all of them were there for the new devices.

As is the case with everything to do with the K-Pop music genre, and particularly the group BTS, the extremely online fandom were also having their say while they waited for a performance from the group.

That performance ended up being a very brief cameo of some of the band members playing with the new Galaxy ZFold2, to the disappointment of many stans.

In addition to the Note phones, the company announced a new wearable: the Galaxy Watch 3, as well as a new laptop-tablet hybrid to compete with Apple's iPad Pro and Microsoft's Surface devices.

There was also a follow up to last year's much hyped Galaxy Fold, a phone that can hopefully avoid its revolutionary predecessors fate.

The original phones were certainly impressive but began breaking almost immediately and required a redesign. The ones that had already been made apparently ending up in the hands of dubious electronics resellers.

Details about the new version, called the Galaxy Z Fold2, are still pretty scant but Samsung claims to have learnt from its first two foldable devices and the people who bought them and has promised "meaningful innovations".

Originally published as World reacts to 'gender fluid' phone