Toshiba delays RD-A1 HD DVD recorder launch
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Lately it's been the Blu-ray[Via HDBeat]Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Lately it's been the Blu-rayFiled under: Misc. Gadgets
Whether urban legend or fact, the fear of iPod theft has created a vast market for this iPod Mobile Security Lock from Targus. As you can see, the chubby end attaches to your wo/man-sack while the end sporting the combination lock somehow “secures” your iPod’s dock connector at a retractable cable length of up to 30.7-inches away. We might be wrong, but this device should make you feel about as secure as a shot of cheap whiskey. On sale now in Japan for ¥4,000 or about $35 green.
[Via Impress]
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This roller skating robot from Japan may not drink and spew catchphrases like "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass", but unlike Bender, you can control this one with your Bluetooth-enabled cellphone
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Plen has 18 movable joints and a 32bit ARM7 CPU inside. You connect him to your PC using USB and he runs/walks/skates for 25 minutes on one charge. There's only a few available from Japan, so if you want one you probably need to hurry. Available from the land of Dragonball Z for 262,500 Yen ($2,200).
Plen: Bluetooth controlled robot goes on sale [New Launches]
Filed under: Portable Video
Twas only yesterday the lads in the Engadget mansion were lamenting about giving Skype a try if only it streamed some of that hot analog TV we've been hearing so much about. Little did we know that in some back alley of Akihabaraville, a team of hucksters from Novac in Japan were putting the finishing touches on their TV for Skype Anywhere (or something like that) product. Just load-up Skype and Novac's software onto your home PC, slip in their USBFiled under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Here ya go TeeVee fans, 5ish new models straight out of Japan. We know it hurts to see all this not-for-the-US tech coming through but just hang with us on these, ’cause from the looks of it, they’ll be available on these golden shores under the EyeFi branding soon enough. The five HDMI-equipped sets break down into 37, 32, and 27-inchers capable of 1920×1080, 1366×768, and 1280×720 pixels respectively. Each model features an ISDB-T Hi-Vision (high definition) digital tuner for Japan (with ATSC and DVB-T tuners on the way for the US and beyond). The big, bad, 37-inch LF-3701DFK (pictured) brings a 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 8-millisecond response, and 176-degree visibility along with the usual in and outs consisting of S-Video, 2 x composite, Japanese D4, and RGB. And fortunately, that speaker sprouting below the panel can be chucked for a cleaner look when attached to your home audio system. The two 32-inch models — LW-3202DFK and LW-3201DFK — are the same panels only with fixed speakers mounted either below, or along sides of the LCD. Same story on those 27-inchers — the LW-2702DFK and LW-2701DFK — with the former also offering that 1366×768 pixel resolution seen by the 32-inch models. Prices are set to range from ¥99,800 to ¥199,800 (or about $863 to $1,729) when these panels hit the streets of Japan starting today — righteous pricing by the time these panels hit the US.
[Via Impress]
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Filed under: Studies
Why does this not surprise us? According to a report published by Japan's government this week, more of its citizens hit the Net via phone -- 69.2 million, to be exact -- than by personal computer (66 million). Mobile users are also more likely than PC users to log on at least once a day by about 11%, not surprising considering the relative likelihood of having your mobile on your person when you just absolutely must check your email. Of course, if our country was completely blanketed in glorious FOMA, we might be able to put up similar statistics, but in the meantime, we'll take an EDGE-ready UX, thankey.Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Filed under: Portable Audio
Cowon of Japan wish to remind you that they’re still shipping the iAudio U2 player. How? By bucking the trend of dropping a limited edition pink model and throwing us the 2GB pearl-white iAUDIO U2-2G-WH instead. Everything else on this popular player, which many of you dubbed the best flash player on the market, remains unchanged: MP3/WMA/WAV and OGG support,128×64 LCD, line-input sound and voice recording to MP3s, FM tuner
, and 20 hour battery with fast recharge. So get ready to enjoy that, uh “color sound” starting July 7 when these hit Japan for ¥18,980 or about $163 in greenback.
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Filed under: Robots
Ok, so while it's not quite as flashy as the Robot Hall of Fame, Nagoya's about to get its automaton on in October when they'll be opening the Robot Museum. We recommend patronizing this landmark if for no other reason than making sure your identity appears in the museum's records of attendance -- anything to score a few points with the bots should they, you know, run amok and use the Robot Museum as the capital for the new world order. You know what? Forget it, we don't need some joke about robots taking over the world to justify attending this museum. You should go because pretty much anything they could put in there -- from Daleks to Totoya assembly arms -- is gonna be freaking phenominal. Did we mention how much we love robots?Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Storage
Researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University have recently announced a breakthrough method for shaping laser beams that could result in optical disc capacities up to ten times higher than what’s current available from state-of-the-art HD DVD and Blu-ray
discs. Using several layers of so-called photonic crystals incorporated into a small semiconductor chip, the researchers were able to manipulate a light beam’s constituent photons in such a way that the resulting laser output could be shaped into a number of exotic beam patterns — such as hollow beams, concentric hollow beams, and most importantly for optical disc capacity, solid beams with diameters much smaller than had been previously achievable. The best part about this technology is that the narrow beams can be formed without changing the wavelength of the laser, meaning that the technique could theoretically be applied to existing blue lasers, enabling next-gen optical discs to hold hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. Or, to put this in layman’s terms, the $1,000 BD-P1000 you’re planning on buying will now be, like, totally obsolete before you even tear open the box.
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Filed under: Displays
Filed under: Displays, Portable Video
Having already wowed us twice with its wall-sized e-newspaper and RFID shielding material, Japan’s Toppan Printing Company has once again managed to impress with a large OLED display that could find its way into all of those portable devices that we love. At 5.5-inches and 400 x 234 pixels, the screen revealed at San Francisco’s Society for Information Display 2006 is one of the larger models of its type, and what’s more, sports active matrix technology to improve upon the passive matrix OLEDs of the past. Brighter, sharper displays realized through Toppan’s manufacturing process will begin showing up on portable DVD players and the like sometime next year.
[Via Akihabara News]
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Filed under: Handsets, RIM, NTT DoCoMo, GSM, GPRS, UMTS
Having already conquered the US and much of Europe, Canada's most famous contribution to consumer electronics is poised to take over yet another Asian market, when the ubiquitous BlackBerry hits phone-mad Japan this fall. Coming hot on the heels of KT Powertel's introduction of the 7100i in South Korea, wireless giant NTT DoCoMo has announced that it is partnering with BlackBerry-maker RIM to offer customers GSM / WCMDA "worldphone" versions of the addictive handhelds -- which is yet another step towards the carrier's commitment of having an all-GSM-enabled lineup within the next two years. Besides the traditional push email functionality that we've come to know and love, nothing much is known about the specifics of these upcoming foreign models, like how the pocket-sized BlackBerries will manage to pack in the thousands of keys necessary to represent all those Japanese glyphs.Filed under: Displays
Filed under: Laptops
HP just gave a bump to their Pavilion lineup with the introduction of their DV1700 and DV5200 laptops in Japan. Destined for casual consumers, not suits, both models feature Core Duo CPUs, up to 2GB memory, ExpressCard slots, a multi-format memory card slot, and HP QuickPlay allowing you to fire-up DVDs and CDs without booting into XP. The DV1700 gets down with a Core D14-inch, 1280 x 768 (WXGA) LCD, up to 100GB SATA disk, Intel’s 945GM Express integrated graphics and the ability to tuck the remote control card away in the ExpressCard slot. The DV5200 features a 15.4-inch LCD with a 1280 x 800 resolution, up to 120GB of SATA disk, integrated Altec Lansing speakers, and the same Intel integrated graphics which may, or may not be adequate to make Vista’s Aero interface sing. Both slabs will drop in Japan on June 2 with base configs for the DV1700 pulling ¥79,800/$710 while the DV5200 will start at ¥84,000 or about $750. Snap of the DV5200 after the break.
[Via Impress Watch]

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Filed under: Robots
It’s no secret that we love us some humanoid robots around here, and while their skiing, fighting, and temp skills are always impressive, all we really wanna do is watch the little guys dance. Unfortunately for us, most of the dancing bots we see around here are crazy expensive — see the Partner Ballroom Dance Robot, for example — including the HRP-2m “Promet” model that costs over $70,000-a-year just to rent. Well apparently Promet’s manufacturer, Kawada Industries, haven’t found much of a market for their pricey life-sized bot, so they’ve teamed up with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and three other firms to build a smaller, cheaper version of the HRP-2m called the Choromet. Powered by LinuxRead | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Filed under: Desktops
Japanese consumers looking for a slim-line tower PC on the cheap could probably do worse than Epson’s latest Endeavor desktop, the AT960, which features a 2.53GHz Celeron D processor and 256MB of DDR2 RAM for $420. More yen lets you step up to a Pentium 4 chip as fast as 3.8GHz, up to 2GB of RAM and 250GB of hard drive space (compared to the sparse 40GB in the base configuration), WiFi, and a DVD burner — but no amount of money can improve upon the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 integrated graphics. Likewise, there’s not much you can do about the dearth of input options, so the four USB
2.0 hookups and serial and parallel ports are gonna have to stand in for the missing FireWire.
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Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds
No surprises here: Nintendo has loosed a version of the venerable Rumble Pak on Japanese DS Lite owners, with a US model forthcoming. Besides being smaller than its big brother in order to fit flushly in the Lite’s cartridge slot, the new Rumble Pak sports all the same vibrating goodness, and for the same price too. (In case you don’t remember, that price is a mere $10). Unfortunately, both versions of the Pak are still only supported by a handful of games, so here’s to hoping you haven’t beaten Metroid Prime Hunters yet.
[Via DS Fanboy]
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Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, Sharp, Vodafone, Symbian, GSM, UMTS
New Softbank property Vodafone K.K. has announced four new 3G handsets -- along with the 2G Toshiba V304T "simplephone" -- that will be released this summer in Japan, including Sharp's 905SH clamshell with a 2 megapixel cameraFiled under: Displays
Mitsubishi has just announced a new 21.3-inch flat panel monitor for the Japanese market, and even though it offers two DVI ports and a UXGA resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, we're not sure how many folks will be willing to part with close to ¥200,000 (about $1,775 US) to have this model on their desks. The RDT212H, in silver or black, does offer a pretty nice 1000:1 contrast ratio, but the 16-millisecond response time won't impress any gamers, and the 300cd/m2 brightness is nothing special, so we're struggling to discover what those hundreds of thousands of yen are really buying you. We'll have to wait a few weeks to find out, though, as that's when this LCD is scheduled to hit stores -- stay tuned to Engadget Japan for the latest.Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio
We’ve been feeling the Walkman love from Sony Ericsson for what constitutes forever on a tech timeline. Oddly, Japan is only now getting their first taste of these little musicphones with the newly announced W42S. However, don’t feel sorry for our
former tech overlords just yet, the W42S packs in a cool 1GB of internal memory which can be supplemented with up to 4GB of Memory Stick Pro DUO expansion and sports a power saving mode allowing up to 30 hours of music playback. This 3G (CDMA2000) slider also features a 1.3 megapixel cam, a 2.2-inch, 240 x 320, 262k color LCD, FM radio
, an EPG to keep you hip to the TV schedule, and a feast of dedicated player controls including a new mechanical wheel unique to Walkman phone navigation. And by partnering with KDDI, owners can snag music over-the-air via the 5 million downloads-per-month strong LISMO music service. No price announced but “local media” is reporting that this musicphone will fetch $181 (with contract and telco rights to your vital organs we presume) when these drop in late June. Click-on for a few hands-on pics.
[Via Impress Watch]




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Filed under: Handsets, Multimedia, Sony Ericsson, KDDI, CDMA
We’ve been feeling the Walkman love from Sony Ericsson for what constitutes forever on a tech timeline. Oddly, Japan is only now getting their first taste of these little musicphones with the newly announced W42S. However, don’t feel sorry for our
former tech overlords just yet, the W42S packs in a cool 1GB of internal memory which can be supplemented with up to 4GB of Memory Stick Pro DUO expansion and sports a power saving mode allowing up to 30 hours of music playback. This 3G (CDMA2000) slider also features a 1.3 megapixel cam, a 2.2-inch, 240 x 320, 262k color LCD, FM radio
, an EPG to keep you hip to the TV schedule, and a feast of dedicated player controls including a new mechanical wheel unique to Walkman phone navigation. And by partnering with KDDI, owners can snag music over-the-air via the 5 million downloads-per-month strong LISMO music service. No price announced but “local media” is reporting that this musicphone will fetch $181 (with contract and telco rights to your vital organs we presume) when these drop in late June. Click-on for a few hands-on pics.
[Via Impress Watch]




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Filed under: Handsets, NTT DoCoMo, GSM
Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that NTT DoCoMo is working to make all of its handsets GSM-compatible in the next two years, which would allow them to work in over 130 countries. Furthermore, DoCoMo’s customers would have access to the popular i-mode Internet service in over 70 countries under the new plan, according to company sources quoted by the paper. Reuters reminds us that this move comes at a time when Japan’s wireless industry is preparing for increased competition this fall, and may also be a response to the attractive packages Softbank can now offer thanks to their recent purchase of Vodafone Japan.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Filed under: Digital Cameras, Displays, Portable Video
Researchers at Japan's Sanyo Epson Imaging Devices Corporation have just developed a series of small LCDs that, unlike most traditional displays, are almost perfectly viewable even at extreme 90-degree angles. Available in sizes ranging from 2.4-inches to 10.1-inches, the displays will be employed in any number of portable devices, from cellphones