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When it comes to consumer electronics, Japan is generally an excellent weathervane for forecasting the picture in the West a few months ahead. With that in mind, the latest electronics sales figures suggest a balmy Fall lies ahead.

Read the full story Household | Japan 04:57 PM J Mark Lytle • Permalink •
Tagged with: blu-ray crt lcd marketing sat-nav

Less than a year after it launched the world’s first OLED television – the XEL-1 – Sony is looking to compete with an entirely different line of next-generation displays called FEDs.

We’ve all heard about Sony’s strategy meeting in Tokyo yesterday (read my report here, if you’re bored), but even more interesting than the news that everything’s going to be connected in Sony’s Brave New World and movies will be streaming left and right were a couple of demo videos unleashed on the underwhelmed journos assembled at the event.

The principle behind noise-cancelling headphones is as elegant as it is simple – sample the noise to be cancelled out and use small speakers to create an equal, but opposite, sound that effectively erases the problem.

Last month, one look at the work Japanese company Eitarosoft is doing with Android made it pretty obvious a closer inspection was in order before the fledgling big player hits the inaccessible heights of some of its current customers.

In yet another one of those tech surveys that says close to nothing while appearing to contain something of substance, a Japanese probe has found that – shock! – some people here are interested in buying an iPhone.

Earlier this month, when we looked at the future of mobile technologies from an academic’s perspective, one of the predictions that stood out was that phone companies looking to encourage mobile micropayments using their handsets would be well advised to team up with a solid financial institution first.

Japan’s legions of small northwest coastal towns are famed for their patchworks of rice paddies and garlands of snow-capped mountains that offer some of the region’s best skiing, but only one is home to a research lab devoted to understanding how we interact with our mobile phones.

Everybody knows the 3G iPhone will hit Japan later this year on the crap-tastic Softbank network, but I don’t believe anyone else was able to get NTT DoCoMo to admit it had been in the race too.

Personally, I think Panasonic‘s DSM-Hand is cool not because it can grab a glass without either dropping it or breaking it (I can do that sometimes), but because it uses gears instead of motors to drive its joints.

One other cool thing I saw at the super-funky Panasonic Center last week was the company’s take on a wall-mounted surface computer.

In this age of environmental awareness, a couple of high-tech Japanese companies have turned the clock back over a hundred years to reduce energy consumption using 19th-century lighting techniques.

Japan has long enjoyed the reputation of being home to some remarkable craftsmen in fields as diverse as ceramics and woodblock prints, but today’s mail brought the first piece of art I’ve ever seen that’s designed to be bashed around by kids at meal times.

Heck - it’s nothing to do with either Japan or technology (at least, not directly), but it is an absolutely stunning piece of animation work by a bona-fide genius.

Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket.

Come the end of next month, one of the last refuges of escape from the digital onslaught of the modern world will be cruelly ripped from us, when Panasonic’s new, fully connected car navigation system goes on sale.

Battlestar Galactica fans on a budget might get a kick out of this Japanese Mama Chari (or ‘Mom’s bike’) named for their favorite pseudo swearword.

Everyone knows that smoking causes the skin to age unnaturally and lines to appear around the eyes prematurely, but who could have guessed that smokers would one day be thankful for their tobacco-induced wrinkles?

Should Homer Simpson ever try to smuggle his unqualified identical twin brother into work in his stead, a new biometric identification system that will be used to secure nuclear plants is sure to prompt a “D’oh!” or seven.

Exotic molecules like carbon buckyballs may soon become part of our everyday lives if the latest prototype fuel cell from Sony ever makes it to the stores.

We recently lifted the lid on just how useful – not to mention pervasive – RFID technology is in Japan, so it’s with a glad heart that we bring you news of a move that’s sure to help it spread more quickly in the West.