Gareth Edwards
Articles by Gareth Edwards
Sharp denies pulling Zaurus out of the US
Last week's report that Sharp was taking its Zaurus PDAs out of the US market didn't come as any great surprise following Sony and Toshiba's retreat. On Friday, however, Sharp came out with an official denial, saying that it's not pulling the Zaurus SL-6000 from the US, will continue to sell it to both home and business users, and will consider future moves based on local demand. On the surface that sounds more like spin than a refutation of the original report, but if they send us an SL-C3000 for Christmas we think we might be able to overlook it.
Shinko Electric's SP-250, for those precious TV moments
From the parallel space-time in which Japanese technology occasionally appears to be developed comes Shinko Electric's SP-250, a remote-controlled printer that you can hook up to a TV (or anything else with an NTSC video out) and use to print out frames at will. It also has a card slot for CompactFlash, MemoryStick, and SD/MMC cards and will print out JPEG/TIFF images. As it's a dye sublimation printer we suppose the quality should be decent, but it doesn't seem to print out on anything much bigger than postcards, which could make the only suggested use they've come up with—printing out recipes from cooking shows—a little unrealistic unless you're into squinting a lot. It also costs about $375, which seems like a lot of cash for a little fun.
Mobile Broadcasting's foldout digital TV cards
These are only available in (and, to be honest, relevant to) Japan at the moment, but Japan's first digital TV PC cards are out soon. We wouldn't bother you with these except for the fact that they might show up in modified form when digital broadcasting to mobile devices spreads beyond Japan, and because anyone who grew up playing with Transformers can't help but be sucked in by the fact that the antenna folds out, which adds a whole new dimension to all those enigmatic oblong cards we've been sticking in our laptops all this time.
Japan's vending machines get addresses
Anyone who's visited Japan will likely have been screwed up to a greater or lesser extent by the country's arbitrary and idiosyncratic address system. The Fukuoka fire brigade sympathise with your plight; they're getting a growing number of calls from cellphones (which they can't trace without carrier help) from people who can't describe accurately where they are (apart from "next to the flaming building", presumably). The solution they've hit on is to slap address labels on vending machines, so next time you run out of a burning building and don't know where you are, dash for the latest drink machine and phone it in. Cans of Calpis don't make a good fire extinguisher, though. Probably.
Chibi Vision, the billboard in a backpack
The Chibi Vision—a "US-patented brand new advertisement method", no less—is a backpack-mounted TFT screen and some unspecified innards that will play back "DVD, CD, SVCD, MP3, CDDA, JPEG, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, and DVD-RW", has stereo speakers, a battery, and so forth. The idea is that you're going to pay its inventors, a shady-looking outfit called Universal Planners, ¥70,000 (or about $640 US dollas) to buy ad-space on one of these for the day, and have someone walk around with it on their back playing your video; in reality, you're just going to laugh at them and spend the money on beer.
Omron aims to make your cellphone even thinner
Mitsubishi has already shown a prototype cellphone screen that uses two alternately flashing backlights to show a different image front and back; now Omron has come along with their take on the idea, the Reversible Light. Instead of the usual clamshell phone setup, where a main and subdisplay (plus a backlight for each) are mounted in the handset, they posit a setup where you'd have a single display serving as both main and sub, with the Reversible Light acting as backlight when you looked at the main and frontlight when you viewed the sub, if that makes sense. (The display and light are the left and right blocks in the diagram, if that helps.) The obvious advantage is halving the thickness of the display components needed, though with more and more stuff being crammed into cellphones we worry that clamshells of the future could end up looking distinctly bottom-heavy.
Mitsubishi drops four-megapixel cameraphone modules
The rate at which phone camera resolutions continue to increase isn't much cause for surprise any more, but another datapoint in the pixel arms-race is Mitsubishi's announcement that it'll start shipping samples of a four-megapixel autofocus module next month. That means we could start seeing four-megapixel autofocus cameraphones sometime around next May to June, though as ITmedia notes (in Japanese, so you'll have to trust us) the image quality problem is shifting to lens and optical zoom technology, or the poorness of it, rather than pixel count per se. In any case, Mitsubishi's module means that shooting nice 2,304x1,728-pixel photos and VGA video at 30 frames per second with your phone will soon be possible, which can't bad at all.
Japan's mini-Segway contender, the PMP-2
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology has come up with a take on the Segway concept that's unlikely to encourage the Japanese government to allow standup two-wheelers on its roads. The PMP-2 loses all that unnecessary bodywork and stuff in favour of a minimal platform-with-wheels design that doesn't inspire much confidence to look at, though it apparently balances alright with a bit of practice (see video). Maximum range is about 6 miles, and the top speed with the current gear ratios is about 4.5mph—the imagined use is carrying it on the train and zipping from the station to your destination, though at 27-pounds it's a bit of a hefty package to lug around. They're apparently looking for a manufacturer to mass-produce these, though at a projected price of ¥100,000 ($1,100) the day when the streets are thronged with PMP-2s on Christmas morn could yet be a way off. Especially not when you apparently look rather constipated while riding it (at least the dude in the video did).
Microsoft to teach infosec at Tokyo schools; Tokyo schools soon to be 0wnz0red
We're not sure what lies behind this curious decision (all right, we could take a guess), but Microsoft is to send employees into several Tokyo schools to instruct pupils on how to protect their computers from viruses. "Install SP2" and "switch to OSX or Linux" are the two cheapest shots that occur to us as suggestions for the class curriculum, but seriously, given MS's recent record we're inclined to think they're the ones who should be taking the classes, not giving them.
Yamaha's room-within-a-room
Yamaha has for a while been marketing in Japan a line of soundproofed rooms-within-a-room for musicians that you can set up in a corner of your already-cramped home. The latest evolution of the range, however, appears to be intended for the opposite purpose, that of shutting out the outside world so that you can work, study, watch DVDs, and so forth. Y440,000 ($4,000) or so gets you a 1.3 x 1.7 m space in which to do whatever you feel like, with a range of interior options and phone, ethernet and TV connections should you require them. We're getting a bunch installed at Engadget HQ next week in the hope that it'll help with the terrible bouts of agoraphobia we've been getting since we moved to this open-plan penthouse.
Yamaha's digital EZ trumpet
Not to be outdone by Roland's digital accordion, Yamaha has come out with an electronic trumpet that lets you avoid having to do the intense cheekwork yourself, like all that buzzing and blowing that the analogue version demands. Instead, you can eiether hum into the mouthpiece and have it convert your mumblings into trumpet-sounding melodies, play using the valves, or just use some combination of the two. We're sure Louis Armstrong is turning over in his grave about now.
KDDI starts song downloads to cellphones
While we were in our usual fog of adulation over the handsets KDDI released last week we failed to note that they also announced the expansion of their massively successful chaku-uta mp3 ringtone download service to support full-length song downloads. In its current form the service sounds like something of a donkey, in the sense that a 48kbps AAC-format song will set you back an astronomical Y300 ($2.75) and you're only able to play it back on a handset with the same number as the one it was downloaded on (no SIMMs in Japan, unless you have a W-CDMA phone). With hard disk cellphones and megabit download speeds looming the quality should improve, though, so if they can lose the DRM and slash prices we might be rewriting this with a bit more enthusiasm in a year or so.
Kyocera's S cellphone gets way too far back to basics
Tu-Ka isn't the Japanese cellphone company that usually makes handset news (its position in the industry there is more that of the hedgehog cowering at the roadside as the 50-ton trucks roar by), but its stripped-down approach occasionally throws up an oddity. Hence, the Tu-Ka S from Kyocera, its most minimalist offering yet, which foregoes even a screen and ends up looking more like a baby intercom than a cellphone. Power and signal strength are both indicated by LEDs that light up for "good", flash for "bad", or stay dark for "dead" when you press the talk key, and there's no memory whatsoever (naturally). Battery life is, as you might expect, exemplary: you get 840 hours standby and 240 mins talk time. Ideal for parents who're worried about getting their kids cellphone-addicted, perhaps, though you have to balance that against the risk that they'll never make any friends carrying one of these.
Low-tech books for bathtime
It's all we can do to stop ourselves from making bad puns about an impending dot-com bubble bath. Japanese startup Frontier 2000 (even their name is right back there in dotcom-bubble-land), an erstwhile maker of telephone cards that seems intent on lurching from one bad business model to another, has hit on the idea of taking out-of-copyright works and printing them on PVC so you can read them in the bath. Now Japan is famed for its love of a good soak, and has more than its fair share of avid readers, but we're thinking this may be, to put it mildly, a niche market. At ¥1,035 (about $10 US) a book we're not talking bargain-basement, either, though it's a snip compared to the option of vinyl vanity publishing, which'll set you back ¥300,000 (about $2,800 US) for the minimum order of 100 copies of a 100-page text-only work. We'll save our money in the hope that a waterproofed WiFi PC comes out soon, thanks all the same. [Via Slashdot Japan]
KDDI's five new babies
It's an unspoken law in the Japanese cellphone industry that handsets never get launched alone, and KDDI abides by it by dropping five newies on us all at once today. As ever with KDDI, the specs of the first four lack the military unity of DoCoMo, and it's pointless trying to nail down common features; there are megapixel cameras that shoot up to QVGA-sized movies, stereo speakers, big screens, the cellphone version of Opera, GPS, Bluetooth, USB webcam functionality, FM radios, and a host of other things spread liberally across the range. The fifth handset announced today is perhaps the pick of the bunch, though: a Marc Newson-designed handset called the talby (pictured above) that has a 3.3-megapixel camera and comes in at 0.5-inches thick and 2.8 ounces.
Takara's VoIP intercom phone
This one sneaked past us at the time, but seems eccentric Japanese toymaker Takara (responsible for the Bowlingual and more recently the Dream Workshop) is coming out with an IPv6 intercom phone, meaning that you can get a small step closer to having everything in your house connected up by Ethernet cables. Plug these in to your network, and picking up one will ring the other. If all this sounds a bit dry and techy, don't worry—Takara hasn't forgotten it's a toy company. You can chain up to five animal toys to the port provided on the handset cradle, which will start singing in chorus when it rings. [Via MoCoLoco]
Dainippon Printing tries clickthrough for magazine ads
Japanese company Dainippon Printing is trying out a model for magazine advertising that's transplanted straight from the web. They're placing product ads in magazines that include QR codes containing a URL (the example on the right is for engadget.com); scanning one with your cameraphone will send you to the product site. The advantages? Not much for the poor user, apart from not having to thumb in a URL, but for advertisers it means being able to keep track of clickthrough and completion rates for a specific ad, plus the fact that they only pay out if an ad click results in a sale. Old Media, this is New Media. Shake hands.
Dwango releases environmentally-friendly ringtones
Unlike rude Western nations like the UK, where leaving your ringtone on even in "no ringtone" train carriages is socially accepted, Japanese good manners dictate that most businesspeople will have their phones set solidly to vibration mode. This obviously isn't an idea that pleases Japan's numerous ringtone providers, and Dwango have taken the lead in launching ringtones that blend into the aural background (and dispelling at a stroke the image their name conjured up of a fat kid with a propeller cap). So now your phone will ring with the sound of someone coughing, or cutlery jangling together, or a host of other "environmental" sounds. We have enough trouble when a character's home phone rings on TV and we reach for the handset, though, and we'd hate to be digging out our cellphone every time the guy next to us coughs. (The photo is of one of Dwango's TV ads, incidentally, not just a shot of two random guys.)
The Tamagotchi's next step: Invading your cellphone
We'd been trying to forget about the new, infra-red version of the Tamagotchi in the hope that it'd go away, but the durn thing keeps evolving. Not content with enabling it to talk to other Tamagotchi, Bandai has now tweaked the infra-red port to let you communicate with a cellphone, meaning you can shop using points you've built up by raising the creature, or send it off on holiday via your phone (sadly, there doesn't appear to be a function for spiking its drinks so that it ends up hallucinating in a Mexican hospital and never makes it back). We're not sure whether the Shuku Keitai Kaitsuu Tamagotchi Plus (the first bit loosely means "Congratulations! It now works with a cellphone!") will make it outside Japan, but we can hope.
Tokyo's videophone police boxes
Latest innovation by the Tokyo police force is videophone kiosks in koban (police boxes) so that you can talk to a cop face to face if everyone happens to be out on patrol (or gone for the night). Looks like they're going one step further, too—this kiosk we came across the other night was in a diminutive hut under a road bridge that didn't seem to have anything else in it. The kiosks do let you do things like calling up and printing out information such as maps to a particular address or the nearest station or bus stop; however, we suspect this cellphone thing that one or two people in Japan seem to have these days might make them a touch irrelevant for most folks.