It's not often that we applaud a foreign media player manufacturer for its choice of naming nomenclature, but Newman's done a swell job with its latest line of ManMans. The A3, A4, A4+, A5 and A6 PMPs all feature lots of glossy, plenty of screen real estate and interfaces not in our native tongue. Granted, there are some notable additions -- including support for PlayFX, the 120GB hard drive within the A6 and a blatant rip of the iTunes logo -- but otherwise, these seem to be fairly middle-of-the-road. Hit the read link for details on each, but don't count on any of 'em heading stateside in the near future.

It's bad (or good, depending on perspective) enough that Hello Kitty has claimed one Epson laptop as its own, but now fanboys and girls can select two other A4 machines to flesh out their collection. Aside from touting heaps of monogrammed cuteness, these machines reportedly weigh in at 6.6-pounds and include a 1.73GHz Intel Celeron M processor, 80GB of hard drive space, 1GB of RAM, and Windows Vista. Seems a little weak considering the ¥189,000 ($1,640) price tag, but it's hard to assign a dollar value to such a design scheme, right? Click on for another color.

While this doesn't mark the first time that we've caught wind of colorized electronic paper, South Korea's LG Philips has announced that an A4-sized rendition of the vivid bendable display has successfully been developed in its labs. The panel reportedly measures just 35.9-centimeters diagonally, is 0.3-millimeter thick, and can display up to 4,096 colors while maintaining the energy efficient qualities that inevitably come with using energy only when the image changes. Unsurprisingly, the company plans on marketing the device as one of convenience and doesn't hesitate to tout its greenness in the process, but unfortunately, it failed to mention when this would find its way out into the general public.

[Via Physorg]

From what we can tell (machine translation often thwarts our best attempts at fact checking), Hitachi will be joining the likes of display manufacturers iRex and Sony when they release a commercial eBook reader in Japan tomorrow. The black-and-white e-ink model, supposedly called the "Albirey" and developed with technology from Bridgestone, seems to sport a WiFi connection with "the possibility to modify making use of radio communication," whatever that means, and comes in a package with standard A4 paper-size dimensions. The Albirey should be available tomorrow starting at what Nikkei Net is claiming to be 4,000,000 yen, which is probably the result of some Google Language shenanigans, 'cause that's like $36,000.

Update: Once again, our readers have stepped in and succeeded where machine translation has failed: apparently the price quoted is for a batch of 10 units, which indicates that this unit probably intended for commercial displays and not consumer eBook consumption. Also, make sure to check out the comments for the full specs.