Wonder Woman had some great moments. Seeing a woman smash a soldier into mush with her shield, toss a tank over people’s heads, and commit wilful acts of beautifully violent misandry was nice. But lurking below the shining feminist bastion of fists and charm lurks a very, very big problem.
Wonder Woman uses an Android tablet.
“No,” my colleague Katharine Trendacosta said when I slapped her during the movie and whispered the above. “That’s a Windows tablet.”
My colleague, as kind and smart as she is, is “gadget dumb”, so I knew she was wrong. While it certainly looked like a Microsoft Surface Pro from afar, director Patty Jenkins was kind enough to zoom in as Diana fired off an email to Bruce Wayne in the film’s closing scenes. And what she zoomed in on was unmistakably an Android email application, on what appears to be a Samsung tablet, possibly the new Galaxy Tab S3. (A quick note: While I’d love to include a screenshot of said tablet, the only ones available right now would be found from a torrented copy of the film, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.)
Wonder Woman gets up every day, puts on her swanky red cloak number, and slips an Android tablet, replete with keyboard case, into her little black bag. Than she goes to work and actually uses that Android tablet for work reasons.
Image: Warner Brothers
From what little I’ve gathered after watching Wonder Woman once and obsessing over it each night as I fall asleep, modern-day Diana is some kind of museum person, possibly a curator. Judging by her office, which was full of skulls and swords, she is not the kind of curator who traipses the halls of her palatial museum, glancing at her tablet every few moments. (Going by my viewings of The Thomas Crown Affair and The Da Vinci Code, that isn’t something curators do.) Traditionally, this sort of person would use a Windows laptop or desktop if they’re working in the non-profit sector, and a Mac if they aren’t. This person would never, ever, use any kind of laptop-like tablet.
The only people who use those devices are, for example, the entire cast of Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s one thing for characters on TV shows to use Windows tablets. I’ve seen artists create incredible art on them, journalists use them at Apple events, and one time my roommate saw one I brought home and said, “That’s cool.”
But you know what isn’t cool? Having one of those characters use an Android tablet. It’s a perfectly fine phone OS, but struggles to expand appealingly on the larger display of a tablet, and is often useless in a desktop scenario. You know who uses Android tablets? People who buy Amazon Fire tablets and… no, that’s actually it. Beyond ultra cheap Amazon tablets, Android has almost no sales, particularly compared to Apple and Microsoft.
We tried to get a screenshot, but we didn’t want to get arrested by the WB police, so here is a dramatic reinterpretation.
Which means it is absolutely egregious for a functionally immortal demigoddess raised by an island full of American Ninja Warrior women and Princess Buttercup to look at the multitude of offerings available for computing needs and say, “Yeah, that Android device seems good.”
Patty, you’ve failed us all.