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The Morning After: Monday, April 24th 2017
Welcome to a fresh new week at Engadget. Over the weekend, you may have missed Uber's latest sketchy tale, a rallying call for truth and science, and a love letter to the Galaxy S8 from a once-Samsung hater.
It takes a village: The rise of virtual pop star Hatsune Miku
The crowd waves neon green glow sticks in the air. The performer they came to see is loading on a screen. After a kaleidoscopic burst of magic dust, Hatsune Miku, one of Japan's preeminent pop stars, appears on stage. As she breaks into a song-and-dance routine, her long aqua-colored pigtails brush her ankles. The thunderous roar inside New York's Hammerstein Ballroom is for an artist who doesn't exist. She's a computer-generated virtual singer projected on a screen.
Virtual pop star Hatsune Miku will tour North America in 2016
Hatsune Miku may have started out as the humble Mascot for a music production software suite, but today she's a bonafide pop star -- and she's about to embark on her first multi-state US tour. Yes, it's a little weird if you think about it too much, but it's happening: starting in April, Miku Expo will be touring Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Toronto and New York, with other possible cities to be revealed later.
Sony and NTT DoCoMo announce limited edition Hatsune Miku-themed Xperia A
NTT DoCoMo has a heritage of exclusively signing up fictional personalities to hawk its handsets and following the likes of Evangelion, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and One Piece, it's the turn of not-actually-real pop idol Hatsune Miku. She'll be emblazoned on DoCoMo's Xperia A, on a limited run of 39,000 handsets. Vocaloid's poster girl offers a turquoise theme to the hardware, with a hair decal on the back. While there's no specific word yet on software-based tweaks, a website explaining the collaboration is inviting suggestions for logos, ringtone and wallpaper. The phone will launch in Japan only this September, so we advise overseas Miku fans to get straight to work on that visa application.
Kenwood's still making Media Kegs, announces bilingual MG-G608 for the Japanese market
We've been covering Kenwood's Media Kegs since the dawn of Engadget, and though we haven't seen one in awhile, there's no question this line of MP3 players is still alive and kicking. The company just debuted the MG-G608 for the Japanese market with a bilingual UI, stereo Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, and one neon chassis. Otherwise, you might find its specs -- namely, a small 2-inch display, lack of video playback, and a modest 8GB of storage -- a bit ho-hum. To be fair, it does support microSD cards as large as 16GB, though even then, you might prefer 32GB, depending on how expansive your Hatsune Miku collection is. Japanese and English speakers alike can pick one up in Japan next month for ¥15,000 ($183).