Gareth Edwards
Articles by Gareth Edwards
Disaster bulletins by cellphone mail
Japan gets hit by most things that nature has to offer; typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes. Add to that a nuclear industry that has in the past regarded mixing uranium in a bucket as perfectly acceptable, and the need for systems to get disaster alerts out to the populace becomes all the more pressing. To that end, Tsuruga City in Fukui prefecture is adding cellphone mail to the usual arsenal of megaphones and emergency broadcasts. Its Y20 mn system should be up and running by year-end and will also send out faxes and phone up fixed-line phones with voice messages in the event of a disaster. Doesn't sound like it would necessarily make for a calm evacuation, if there can be such a thing, but as the city is home to four nuclear reactors and is too close for comfort to the Mihama reactor at which four people were recently killed, we understand their urgency. [Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]
Japan bans cellphone use while driving; IOData is ready
We saw this Bluetooth headset + adaptor for non-Bluetooth cellphones and were left rather unmoved, especially given the Y30,000 ($275) pricetag, but Wireless Watch Japan puts a pertinent spin on the news by reminding us of the fact that Japan is banning cellphone use while driving as of November 1, suggesting that we could be seeing a lot more in this vein before long. With pricing this steep, though, we'd have thought the usual cable type of earphone mic is likely to outsell the Bluetooth variety. Not much hope for makers of the usual kind of Bluetooth headset, either, as there are only about two Japanese phones that have Bluetooth built in as yet. [Via Wireless Watch Japan]
Ricegrain-sized atomic clock
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has come up with an atomic clock the guts of which measure 1.5 x 4 mm, which they claim is 100X smaller than any rival. Unfortunately it would end up measuring a slightly less impressive 1 cubic centimetre once an oscillator and control circuits are attached, but it looks like a big use for this might be in military location devices where space is not at such a premium. Benefits down at the user end should include better accuracy for GPS receivers.
The postcard-sized Hagaki PC
Japanese lesson of the day: hagaki means "postcard". Hence, the Hagaki PC, a low-rentish touchscreen device whose main selling point is the fact that it's a postcard-sized 13.5 x 11 cm x 1.8 cm (hell, that's a thick postcard) and weighs 340g. The guts are a 266Mhz AMD Geode SC1200 and 128MB of memory, and there are CF, USB1.1 and headphone ports. Everything goes a touch downhill from there, unfortunately; no hard drive, so you have to boot your OS off a CF card, microdrive or USB drive, and there's no inbuilt WiFi, ethernet port, or even modem. It'll run Windows 95/98/2000 XP or Linux, and should sell for about Y100,000 ($900). That's quite a bit cheaper than the Y180,000 that the somewhat-larger Sony Vaio U50 goes for, but a good chunk more than most PDAs. The twixt-rock-and-hard-place pricing and the DIY looks combined make it a little hard to get too worked up about this one.
Sony's QRIO turns ambassador
Latest job for Sony's QRIO robot: it's been appointed a "Science Messenger" by UNESCO and will be zipping round the globe to educate children about science and technology. We can't help being a little bit sour because no cool little robots came to teach us things at school; the closest we got was a clammy little old lady or two. [Via Impress PC Watch (Japanese)]
Take your Linux desktop on the road with the GlobeTrotter
LaCie, previously famous for the unstoppable extremeness of their Bigger Disk Extreme and their silver-ingot external drives, has dropped their latest silvery Porsche-designed external drive on us. The difference this time is the inclusion of a Linux distro on board courtesy of MandrakeSoft, so you can hook the GlobeTrotter up to any PC or Mac via USB, whence it will detect the hardware and boot you up a Mandrake Linux desktop. At 40GB the drive itself isn't tremendously large, and you're obviously not going to have much luck working on planes with it, but at $219 the pricing doesn't seem too steep. [Via Mycom PC Web (Japanese)] UPDATE: A couple of sharp-eyed readers point out that Mandrake won't boot on the PPC chips that Macs use, though you can access 10MB of the GlobeTrotter's hard drive space. Thanks for the correction.
Oh my God! They killed Panny!
Despite the fact that Panasonic's latest webcam/server bears a certain resemblance to a character from South Park (don't worry, we're sure there's a warranty should the worst happen), we rather like its stumpy looks and the addition of 802.11g to the previous model's 802.11b, even if the camera is the 320,000 pixel resolution that seems to be standard on these things. Can be accessed via a PC (video streaming) or phone browser (still images only), with pan and tilt control available from both. It also detects infrared and will move the camera to point at anything that its IR sensor picks up. Should sell in the low Y40,000s (say $360-$400).
NEC's 11mm VersaPro Tablet PC unveiled
NEC's announced the 11mm-thick Tablet PC that Microsoft was waving around at a presentation a few weeks back. Called the VersaPro VY11F/GL-R, it's powered by Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, better-looking than the blurred photo that was all we had up to now, and weighs in at 885g, though that does bump up to 899g if you add WiFi. 10.4-inch TFT screen, Pentium M 733 processor, three USB 2.0 slots, though battery life isn't all that impressive, at 1.6-2.4 hours using the small battery or 2.8-4.2 hours with the medium. Pricing looks to be around the Y300,000 ($2,700) mark, though since these are built to order that'll obviously slide depending on what you choose.
Mini webcam for the road
Japanese firm Persol has a neat tool for the camgirl on the go, er, we mean, the road warrior telecommuter; a 300,000-pixel webcam and headset mike with a carrying case that fits them and the cables. Should sell for about ¥5,000 ($45 US), which is still a lot considering how big of a nerd you'll look and feel when you bust this out. [Via Ascii24]
Japan mulls P2P for patient info
P2P filesharing gets a bad rep from the recording and and movie industries, who're apt to paint it as a technology that doesn't have any legitimate uses. However, the Japanese government's National Institute of Communications and Information Technology is experimenting with a P2P network that links up 16 hospitals and allows them to do high-speed searches and transfers of encrypted patient information and high-quality 3D moving images. The aim is to avoid doubling up on medical tests, avoid the risk of double-dosing patients with drugs, and make sure that their medical histories are immediately available even if they switch hospitals. We assume they've built in a feature to stop interns from using it to swap J-Pop albums in their free time.
Mitsubishi's vitamin-boosting fridge
Among the slew of new household products Mitsubishi has just announced are several refrigerators that will boost the vitamin C content of your vegetables by 10% during storage (though not if you leave them in there for a year or two, we presume). The trick is that instead of plunging your legumes into total darkness the "Delicious Vitamin Boost Light Power Vegetable Compartment" uses coloured LED lights at frequencies that don't "stimulate germination", and they have some graphs and photos of a cabbage to prove it works.
So just how small is IBM's ultra small ThinkCentre?
OK, this is a slender excuse for news, but we couldn't resist mentioning Ascii 24's description of the IBM ThinkCentre S50 ultra small desktop as being "the width of four tennis balls", and they even went to the trouble of putting up a photo. We're not sure whether to be impressed or indifferent about the fact itself, but that's the sort of innovative reviewing we need more of.
Canon attempts to revive pocket calculator, dies trying
Seeing new desktop calculator models come out sort of reminds us of tweaks to a car model that's soon to be phased out (though 1.5 million are still sold in Japan each year), but we rather like the fact that Canon's new USB desktop calculator/ten-key add-on also has a USB 2.0 hub and cursor keys built in. The thought of all those USB cables snaking around is a bit unappealing, though. Also, there's fierce competition in the form of their own model with a built in trackball. What we really want is a Bluetooth calculator, though; that'd be something with real brag value.
Motorola's smartphone for Japan
Well, we knew Nokia was angling for a return to the Japanese market, and now Motorola is getting in on the act too. They've inked an agreement with NTT DoCoMo to provide a dual FOMA/GSM/GPRS phone targeted at corporate users that should be out in spring next year. It'll be PDA-sized and (so the speculation goes) powered by either Symbian or Linux, and will include Bluetooth and wireless LAN (probably 802.11b, as it will be usable with DoCoMo's public hotspot network). It will also be able to connect via an ISP and browse regular websites, where current DoCoMo handsets are tied to i-mode and sites developed for phones. Pricing will be at a premium to the Y30,000 or so that most 3G FOMA phones go for. They also describe it as the first FOMA phone to be usable outside Japan, which is odd given recent news about NEC's imminent-looking N900iG worldphone.
Please don't buy a Yamaha Internet keyboard if you're inviting us over
Yamaha's latest "home keyboard" models (if you were going to diss on them you'd definitely be calling them organs rather than synthesizers) come with the ability to hook up to a DSL modem and download new songs to pick out on said keyboard, karaoke tunes with lyrics to sing along to, or just muzak. We'd just love it if you invited us over to your house and you ineptly picked out a couple of songs for us, then set it to muzak mode to provide us with some relaxing background tunes. So please, get one as soon as possible. There are a just a few minor things that concern us, such as why it needs a DSL connection to download MIDI files with some text attached, or why it costs two hundred and twenty fricking thousand yen, for example. For that sort of money, you could rig up a bunch of Angelshare wine coolers filled with Taittinger into a twenty-one-gun salute and still have enough change to post bail when the Feds caught you for unlawfully having fun (maybe). [Via Japan.CNET.com]
Smartcard Cellphone Concerns, Part 43: Battery Death
So, in addition to worrying about what happens to your e-money and train pass if your new DoCoMo FeliCa smartcard handset should fall into the wrong hands, another thing that may have occurred to you is the potentially dire implications of having your battery die just before you suavely swipe your way past the cash register after that sushi dinner. Well, fear not: Sony has been kind enough to hold a PR event to tell us, among other things, that RFID chip in the phone still works even if the power is off. What happens if you run out of e-money? We'll get back to you on that one. This has been a public service announcement.
NEC's every-band phone is GO
We reported a while back that it looked like NEC was soon to be releasing the first phone that would work pretty much everywhere (including Japan), and now we have something more than a Babelfished Italian website to rely on. The NEC N900iG will apparently work with FOMA, tri-mode GSM/GPRS, and (probably) UMTS, and looks like it'll be in line with the spec of DoCoMo's current FOMA range, with twin cams (megapixel outside and videophone-cam inboard), barcode reader, etc. Still no definitive word on whether this is going to go on sale outside Japan, however.
Sony's $10,000 Qualia TV
Sony's Qualia showrooms, like Ferrari dealerships, are not places you go near unless that bonus for landing the big IPO has hit your bank account. It probably comes as little surprise, therefore, to find that the latest in the Qualia range, the 46-inch KDX-46Q005 LCD TV, comes with a price tag of Y1,100,000 (just over $10,000). The list of features would take all day to run down because Sony's gone kid-in-a-sweetshop crazy and crammed in pretty much everything it can find (hell, there's probably a PSP in there if you can find the right slot to open), but the main highlight on the picture front is the use of an LED backlight, which Sony claims improves colour reproduction considerably versus the usual fluorescent kind. It's the first model to feature an interface powered by the PS2's Graphics Synthesizer and Emotion Engine chips, too, and comes with a clamshell, joystick-equipped remote control that looks like you could use it to pilot a plane and solve complex equations while you watch.
The OKO Trike, an illusion of freedom for your kids
It's a sad day when trikes for young children have to come accompanied with a woman minder in Matrix leathers—it's not, after all, as if your three-year-old is particularly likely to rev up and roar off to join a biker gang—but the OKO Trike at least manages to outdo the pram in providing an illusion of involvement in the whole propulsion and route-choosing process (and if they start to get antsy just set give them an OQO to play with). [Via MoCoLoco]
Video of Seiko Epson's flying microbot
Ah, damnit; we'd just got the call from the boss to go and check out Seiko Epson's flying robot doing its stuff at an exhibition in Tokyo at the end of the month, when we find they've gone and held a press demo of the little beast in flight. Only consolation (not that this is schadenfreude or anything) is that the PC used for programming it for independent flight apparently threw a hissy fit on the day, so the only good video available is of a guy piloting it. They apparently also managed to get into trouble when it went out of Bluetooth range (we could introduce them to some guys who could help with that) just flitting around in an office, so it seems there's some refinement still to be done all round. One thing we can confirm, though, is that it has a camera on board to beam back images and (per the picture to the right) Seiko Epson has all kinds of sci-fi delusions in mind for its future uses. We'll still be heading to the exhibition to try and catch it in independent flight (and hoping we don't get an eye taken out by its rotors). [MPEGs at PC Watch] [WMV at MyCom PC Web and Japan.Cnet.com]