New Japan carrier, new Windows Mobile handheld

Today sees a new carrier enter Japan's gorillapolistic cellphone market; eMobile, the cellular subsidiary of ADSL infrastructure company eAccess, is sliding in with a data-only HSDPA service that'll start this March and grow a voice element in 2008.

For the moment, they're offering one standalone Windows Mobile 5 gadget, the Sharp EM ONE, which looks to be a remix of the WinMob units Sharp's provided to Willcom thus far; it sports Bluetooth 1.2, 802.11b/g, OneSeg digital TV support, a 4.1-inch wide-VGA screen, and a "dual-slider" keyboard that can expose either the full QWERTY goods HTC-style or simply a directional/enter key, as desired. It will support voice calls once the network does, and it looks like Skype can fill in some of the gap for the meantime. (The remainder of the current range are CF/Express Card/USB devices for laptop use.)

Service costs run about Y5,980 per month before discounts, with the initial cost for an EM ONE determined by whether you opt to remain unfettered by contractual obligations (Y95,000), or go for a one-year contract (Y71,000) or two years (Y39,800).

Voice services will be supported in their initial phases by a roaming arrangement with NTT DoCoMo to provide nationwide coverage; it's not entirely clear at present how extensive eMobile's own network is.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Turbolinux's wizpy media player/portable PC

Japanese firm Turbolinux is showing off an interesting device called the wizpy, which doubles as a portable media player and as a take-anywhere Linux box that you can hook up to a PC via USB to access your apps and settings. As a media player it handles OGG/mp3/WMA/AAC audio and DivX video and includes an FM radio, voice recorder and still picture/text viewer; in PC mode, you get access to Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, wordprocessing and other applications and about 2.5G of storage space on flash memory.

The wizpy comes in at a pretty compact 84x42x12mm and a featherlight 60g, with battery life claimed at 10 hours. It's only a prototype at the moment (though the Turbolinux folks had one connected to a Windows laptop to give the launch presentation, so it's certainly beyond the Photoshop stage), but they indicate it should be out next February for under Y30,000.

[Via Impress PC Watch (Japanese)]

Sharp's OneSeg TV-enabled electronic dictionary

We always thought that electronic dictionaries were intended as a study tool rather than a distraction, but Sharp seems to disagree. Their Papyrus PW-TC900 not only includes an indecently large number of dictionaries (40 or so), it also sports a 4.3-inch, 480x272 dot ASV LCD and a one-segment digital TV tuner to make sure you can, er, keep up on current affairs while you study. There's an SD card slot for MP3s, new dictionaries and XMDF or text-format e-books. Size is a slightly chunky 132x91x22.5mm (see comparison courtesy of sizeasy), and battery life is 25 hours in dictionary mode or 5 hours as a TV.

Actually, reading through the details of the press conference we find that this is aimed at businessmen in their 40s--so the emphasis may be more on sneaking in some TV time on the train or while pretending to write that important memo to the New York office.

Out on December 8 in Japan, and should sell for about Y50,000.

[Via K-tai Watch (Japanese)]

Solid Alliance's latest, the UFO-detecting keychain

Solid Alliance, they of the implausible USB devices and ghost-detecting novelty goods, fill another gap in their daft gadget range with the U-tan Radar, a conveniently-sized UFO and alien detector.

Thoughtfully, the U-tan can be hung from your cellphone, where it promises to alert you should you enter an area "where it looks like a UFO could appear". A short push on the button also gives you the ability to manually confirm the possibility of a Close Encounter, and, should you be in the presence of a suspected alien, you can hand them the detector and ask them to hold the button until it beeps. As it appears to work on skin resistance (in the same way as devices that measure body fat), you may find that it has a tendency to tell you that obese people are aliens. If, however, you're still convinced that you don't have a false positive, your choices are limited to playing dumb or begging for your life; hopefully future models will include the all-important option of giving your new friend the U-tan as o-miyage so that the included miniature nuclear device can auto-detonate inside its mothership and wipe out its race.

Developed under the supervision of renowned UFO-chaser Yaoi Jun'ichi, for maximum kudos, and available via Solid Alliance's Rakuten store for Y2,222, though they appear to be sold out until end-November at the moment.

[Via Engadget Japanese]

POP mail on a DoCoMo htc z

This is likely the most obscure post we've ever written, but on the offchance it may help someone: if you're using a DoCoMo business phone (the Motorola M1000 or htc z are the models currently available)and DoCoMo's mopera ISP, you may find you're having trouble sending mail from other POP accounts.

The reason is simple: mopera blocks port 25 for mail sending. However, there's hope: check with your provider if they allow you to send via port 587 or 465. If they do, open up your mail account settings and add ":587" or ":465" after your sendmail server's address (we also had to tag the "send using SSL" option). And away you go.

[Via Windows Mobile powered Smartphone Help & How Tos (Microsoft Windows Mobile, Windows CE, Mobile Computing, Mobile device), and several conversations with bemused DoCoMo tech support people and one great bloke who knew exactly what he was doing]

DoCoMo's well-timed fightback

With the introduction of number portability imminent, DoCoMo has unveiled six new handsets that--for the first time in a while--look like it is still interested in remaining top dog.

The 903i series, announced late yesterday Japan time, finally adopts GPS in many models, updates the FeliCa chips, brings in HSDPA and OneSeg on more phones, and offers support for Napster's new music download service. In short, there is a lot here that should keep existing subscribers where they are and help encourage defections from competitors.

Most symbolic of the abrupt and aggressive shift in DoCoMo's stance may be the SH903iTV, the second of Sharp's "Aquos Keitai" models. The first Aquos phone was Softbank's jewel in the crown, with its unconventional screen-flipping act brought centre-stage in TV commercials to emphasise how "unexpected" the new company was. DoCoMo has hit back with a bit of good old Crocodile Dundee-style one-upmanship ("that's not an Aquos keitai; this is an Aquos keitai") by getting Sharp to create a version that boosts the screen size considerably and makes Softbank's look second-class. The real challenge, of course, will be to see whether it can slow au's advance, and in terms of brand image the latter has the advantage, with DoCoMo coming across as the safe, staid choice while au has all the thrills.

[Read: DoCoMo press release]

Softbank gets it right (where others stumble) with the X01HT

DoCoMo and Softbank Mobile have both got their sticky paws on HTC's Hermes and are about to launch it in Japan as, respectively, the hTc Z and the X01HT. Softbank's version gets the edge on DoCoMo's by supporting HSDPA, though the network only covers metro Tokyo and a few major cities at present, and for some reason it can only suck down data at 1.8Mbps, half the service's rated max of 3.6Mbps.

All that dry stuff aside, the real question here is why the two companies are selling essentially the same phone for prices that are almost Y50,000 apart. Softbank's model comes in around Y20,000 with a two-year contract, while DoCoMo is selling the hTcZ through its docomo.biz site rather than usual retail channels, to existing subscribers only, and wants you to stump up Y73,000 for the privilege.

Sure, there's a question here of DoCoMo not wanting to get out of bed unless you're willing to sign on for the full Exchange Server push email deal and a bushel of handsets. But that's no reason to give such a monumental shaft to the individual customers who must now be positively priapic at the thought of a decent smartphone that works in Japan, after the miserable Motorola M1000. Why not stuff a few down the retail channel at a reasonable price and risk being pleasantly surprised if you shift a few units?

We're hesitant to switch to Softbank Mobile just to get our hands on a better phone, given the poor rep it has for network coverage, but seriously, if DoCoMo keeps pulling this lumbering mammoth act in the age of number portability then it deserves to get its ass filled full of spears by more aggressive and lightfooted pursuers.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese]

Why are Roombas so expensive in Japan?

We've recently been thinking it would be nice to get a Roomba to keep HQ clean, and figured given the US pricing that we'd be able to pick one up for perhaps Y20,000-Y30,000. We were in for a shock.

A quick look at some Japanese online shopping sites shows that prices for officially-imported Roombas in Japan approach 3X those in the US. A Roomba Red that currently sells for US$149.99 on Amazon will set you back at least Y46,980 on Rakuten (an online mall that's usually a standout for its low pricing). That's just over US$400 at today's exchange rates. Higher-end models run to more than double that price.

This kind of differential isn't unknown in Japan, but it's intermittent. On the whole, where there's an official distributor -- as with the Roomba -- our experience has been that prices tend not to be extortionate, except for items like clothing and leather goods that carry hefty import duties. So why does the Roomba cost 2X-3X as much here? There's presumably some overhead for localizing the documentation, and possibly for regulatory approval, but it's hard to believe that would double the unit cost, and easier to think that the company and its importer see the pricing point as being acceptable here. We'd be interested to be proved wrong.

Anyone in Japan and similarly unwilling to part with the sums described above for a Roomba can draw some consolation from a site called Shop.com, who we don't know from Adam, but are offering Roombas more or less at US pricing (say Y18,000 for a Red). Caveat emptor, and all that.

TakaraTomy's fusion of Tamagotchi and coin bank

TakaraTomy have come up with another great, wacky product in the Life Bank (Jinsei Ginkou), the riff on the coin bank that the 21st century has been waiting for. The Bank's screen shows you the life of a stick man who starts out as a poor pleb in a cupboard-sized apartment and develops into a rich bastard lounging under a chandelier on the 500 yen coins you feed him, all the while counting you down to your up-to-Y100,000 savings target. Then you open up the box and find he actually has spent all your money on 8-bit hos and lo-rez champagne.

Out mid-November in Japan for around Y4,000-Y5,000.

[Read: Product page (Japanese)]

[Via Tokyo Mango]

Baby diamonds

Now this is worrying: A Russian company that will make you a synthetic diamond from your baby's hair (for a--very steep--price, naturally). Pink Tentacle has the sordid details. In fact, they're not picky about what or whom the hair is from, it seems -- so you could wear a little nugget of dear departed Tiddles around your neck rather than having her stuffed, if that's the way you're wired.

Kawasaki Heavy's battery-powered tram

Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) announced late last week that they're developing a tram (or a Light Rail Vehicle, in their terms) powered by nickel-metal hydride batteries, and that they've already succeeded in getting a test unit to run for 10km on a single charge.

The SWIMO, to get its misleadingly amphibious-sounding monicker out of the way, is apparently named for the fact that it is a MOver that WIns the ability to Smoothly run in areas with no electrical power and lets you get on and off equally Smoothly. (Apologies for the reverse order, but it would've gotten even more complex had we tried to reproduce the Japanese syntax). Someone fire the KHI acronym department already.

The 10km test appears to have been run with a 1950s-desgined two-carriage train provided by minuscule Kyushu-based Chikaho Electric Railroad, so once the SWIMO prototype (which presumably will be a lot lighter) appears in 2007 KHI expects the range to go up quite a bit. Japan could certainly use a few less cars, and our completely arbitrary opinion is that trams are cooler than buses. Obviously, though, what we really want is the space-age version rather than the dowdy artist's impression shown here.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

DoCoMo to launch video voicemail

NTT DoCoMo announced yesterday that they're to launch a video voicemail service on September 20. 68 of its 3G FOMA handsets support the service; if you are making a videophone call and get redirected to voicemail you will now have the option to follow onscreen prompts and leave a video message, of up to 3 mins in length. SMS is used to inform you of waiting messages.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

Japan gets countdown traffic lights

One gratifying feature of many pedestrian crossings at large intersections in Japan is that they feature a segmented LED "hourglass" LED next to the lights themselves, with red-lit segments disappearing to indicate the time until you can cross. Now Nagoya is trialling the next-gen of the same approach, with a numeric display above/below the obligatory standing/walking pedestrians. The benefit versus the old version (apart from the fact that we think they look cool) is the fact that you can now tell how long it'll be until the lights change in either direction, rather than simply from red to green as in the past. Presto--relief for impatient people everywhere, provided those numbers count down pretty fast; we'd go spare waiting 50 seconds to cross the road.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese); photo from Yahoo Japan]

OQO officially available in Japan

Brule has announced it's to begin selling the OQO Model 1+ (in both Win XP Pro and Tablet flavours) in Japan. There have been a few shops importing the OQO up to now, but this marks the start of sales via an official route with Japanese interface as standard. No changes that we can see to the specs, and the price looks to be around the US mark at Y259,800 for the Pro version and Y279,800 for the Tablet version.

[Via Impress PC Watch (Japanese)]

Ricoh's WiFi/Bluetooth Caplios

Ricoh today announced two additions to its Caplio range, the Bluetooth 2.0-toting 500SE model B and the Bluetooth/WiFi 500SE model W. The latter supports 802.11b and g, plus WEP and WPA/WPA2 security. Both have an 8.13-megapixel CCD and 3X optical zoom, and sport a 2.5-inch LCD on the back. Storage is via 26MB of internal memory and SD cards. As you'll have surmised from the rather functional looks, the cameras are also water/shock/dust resistant.

Weight and pricing are both hefty; the 500SE clocks in at 482g with battery on board, and will cost you Y115,500 ($990) for the Bluetooth model and Y130,200 ($1,100) for the WiFi unit.

[Via Ascii24 (Japanese)]

Japanese government prepares online lie-detector

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is, for reasons best known to it, earmarking Y300 mn in its 2007 budget to produce what the Asahi Shimbun terms a lie-detector for online information.

The reality appears to be not so much that as an automated fact-checker that draws on related information to spot how likely something is to be a load of old balls. The Ministry envisages it being able to give you search results in order of their reliability, or tell you that a piece of info is 95% crap and ask if you'd still like to display it. Example questions they see it being able to answer include "is this company analysis on the mark?", "is this a natural-sounding description of the political situation within Lebanon?", or "are the functions of this overseas electrical appliance described accurately in this auction listing?".

They note that key hurdles will be whether they can find reliable internet-based sources of information related to a search, and develop technologies that can accurately assess meaning and provide high-level machine translation, amongst other things.

It's unclear how they plan to establish the reliability of information, beyond taking the route of building an engine that tells you how in- or out-of-consensus a particular document is based on word frequencies or some other measure. And we somehow doubt that the AI Holy Grail of software that understands the meaning of natural language and can translate it accurately is about to be reached by some government researchers with $3 mn in funding. But still, nice of them to try.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

USB Korean barbecue

We've featured the work of Kaizo Aho Ichidai before, and it's glad to see he's still pushing out the barriers of hardware idiocy. Latest project is a USB-powered barbecue hotplate, though unfortunately we doubt this is ever going to hit the shelves. Disappointed by his lack of success with USB-powered egg-frying, he wasn't going to do things by halves for his next culinary experiment; his hotplate runs off a desktop with six USB expansion cards in the back, and harnesses the power of 30 USB ports. However, as the video on his site confirms, the result is some bona-fide Korean-style meat-grilling action and, shortly thereafter, dinner.

[Read: Kaizo Aho Ichidai (Japanese)]

[Via Slashdot Japan]

Willcom W-Zero3 [es] in the garage: Part Two

Before we proceed with reviewing the [es], bear with us as we digress into the issue of battery life. We hadn't envisaged launching in to the second part of this review with a complaint, but this is something we need to deal with up front.

First, the spec sheet: Sharp claims that the [es]'s battery gives 7 hours of talktime and 500 hours of standby (300 if the signal-strength LED on the front of the case is left lit). The manual also claims that around 3.5 hours is needed for a full charge, and doesn't make any mention that we could immediately see of needing to do the old 16-hour super-charge and drain-to-nothing routine that used to be recommended.

On Sunday, after charging the phone for perhaps 5-6 hours, we downloaded Skype onto it, set up and checked a POP email account, and then turned the phone off overnight. On Monday morning, we turned it on at around 9am, checked email a couple of times, and didn't do much else. At 2.30pm, we got a low battery warning (from a look at the power management settings, this indicated that the battery had around 1/6th remaining).

We switched off and took the [es] home to charge. We gave it around a 10 hour charge on Monday night, used it to check mail a few times and write a short blog post on Tuesday, then turned it off in the evening. On Wednesday, we switched it back on in the morning and checked mail. At midday, low battery warning.

On each occasion we charged the phone we noticed that no matter how long we left it, the battery charging light remained on. We couldn't immediately determine whether the light does switch off to indicate that the battery is fully charged, or not. This morning, seeing that the light remained on after a further 10+ hours charging, we decided to leave the phone at home on charge all day to see what happened.

Clearly things like the front-panel LED and keyboard backlight have an impact on battery life, but we had already disabled both before we used the phone on Tuesday. One other possibility that occurs to us is the phenomenon we noted a few times when waking the phone from standby, where it appeared to be in the midst of a data transfer--we're not sure whether this was to check mail or for some other reason, and it seemed to automatically disconnect again after a short period. However, presumably this would drain the battery if any data were being shifted back and forth. As we're not using the phone for voice calls as yet, we also disabled the SIM for good measure to see if this gained us any extra battery life, but as we were already running low on juice at that point the results were inconclusive.

To sum up, though, we have a nagging feeling that we're not simply missing a setting that would magically give us the promised battery life; we have to wonder whether the official figures themselves are not massively overstated. We'll reserve final judgement until after we've run the phone through an all-day charge, however.

Next, some more interesting stuff about the general look and feel.

Sony's mylo: An uncharacteristic bit of common sense?

What does Sony's mylo tell us? A few thoughts.

One: Can we hope that Sony's choice of mostly third-party software (Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger) marks an admission of its weakness in software development and a decision to give up the route of providing half-assed, poorly supported proprietary apps?

Two: Does the very existence of the mylo indicate that Sony is giving up on the chronically delayed development of the PSP into a multimedia/VoIP device? Or is this the lite version of the PSP-to-come?

Three: A few theories have been advanced for why Sony's not launching mylo in Japan, which historically must be its most tolerant market for new devices. Lack of WiFi coverage is one, and it's an argument not without merit, though cheap subscription-based hotspot services are on the rise. To turn that on its head, though, is the mylo simply a good example of quick, opportunistic thinking and development from Sony? Could they, god forbid, be doing something sensible for a change by looking at a set of conditions (rise of IM/web-based apps/VoIP, prevalence of WiFi in campuses and other US locations) and working up a product based on them?

[Read: Sony press release]

Japan's first WiFi trains get underway

This is one of those Holy Grail stories we've been watching develop for what seems like years: the Japanese railway industry's achingly slow progress toward getting WiFI onto its trains. Finally, though, the consortium developing wireless access for the Tsukuba Express (fittingly, the line linking one of Japan's most noted concentrations of corporate R&D with its largest consumer-electronics paradise) have announced that from August 24 their service goes into commercial operation. It will be available on around 60% of Tsukuba Express trains, to users of NTT DoCoMo's Mzone and Mopera U hotspot services. The infrastructure is 802.11b only for the moment, and speeds average out at around 1.4Mbps, though project partners Metropolitan Intercity Railway, Intel and NTT-BP seem enthusiastic about expanding the range of services on offer.

[Via Ascii24 (Japanese)]