KDDI's oval phone from Kyocera

One of the lone bright spots of news on a sluggish post-bank-holiday Tuesday in Japan comes in the form of Kyocera's A1403K (we wish they'd dropped the numbers and just called it the Blob or something). As are most experiments at "reducing the distance between human and machine", it's round and clearly wants to be your friend. Unsurprisingly, it sounds like KDDI is pitching it at higher age brackets, with a user interface that makes key features easier to access, and the ability to have it read out email or your call history aloud. By no means should older users take this as implying that all of them have bad eyesight and are not to be left alone with objects that have corners.