Had a great evening with Umihiko Namekawa (front and center), a translator who writes TechCrunch Japan and Serkan (sitting to my right), a grad student living in Japan who is working on a Web 2.0 project and reads and seems to enjoy CrunchGear and TC. We went to Jetee, a place in Tokyo’s former red light district. The place was about as big as a modern American bathroom but it’s definitely recommended for its odd amalgam of French music and weird decor. Good times. I’m still here in Tokyo until Saturday, so drop me a line at john@crunchgear.com if you want to rock and roll all night and party every day.

I’m going to take this opportunity to say something that has been bothering me all week here at CEATEC: Japan is no longer the home of innovation. Sure, they kicked our asses for years in terms of wireless media, cellphone design, and PC/laptop manufacturing but at this late date I think the iPhone can kick any DoCoMo clamshell and I haven’t seen a single thing here — NOTHING, mind you — that I haven’t seen or heard of in the U.S. already and that would even mildly twiddle my neophilia sensors.


Wonka bars!

Take the Infobar 2, for example. This is a candybar cellphone designed by famous Japanese designer Sum Guy. The phone is about as long as a Zune and has a bunch of buttons on the front and plays mobile TV. It’s shaped like “melted candy” or some crap which is designer code for “I got hungry and drew a Hershey bar.”

Everything I saw here was an incremental improvement over the previous generation of the exact same thing. The Japanese trade show attitude is “pull all the nerds out of R&D, show home wireline communications gear and robots made out of watch parts and hide everything cool at the back where even the young ladies in mid-riff baring futuristic bra ensembles can’t find it.” It really pisses me off that the world of the future is, in reality, about as futuristic as a mall in Columbus, Ohio.

Does this mean that U.S. tech folks can rest on their laurels, a job well done? No, it means we need step things up considerably. If the Infobar 2 is the hottest cellphone release in Japan then these boys are definitely asleep. Come on, Motorola! Come on TiVo! Come on Sonos! Come on everyone who makes cool stuff in the U.S.! Take some risks. It can’t be much worse than this sleek melange of high design and low expectations.

I’m not saying you’re not pretty…

A prototype fuel cell emergency power supply

This is totally gross. I was walking by the Fujitsu booth when I saw the vein-scanning PalmSecure mouse that uses the veins in your hand to log you into a PC. I figured it wouldn’t look that bad — like a fingerprint at worst — so I asked the guy to run the demo for me. He placed his hand over the mouse for a few seconds and then his vein scan popped up…

Worms, Roxanne! Worms!

It looked like worms. Like really squirmy worms inside his hand. Seriously: if someone made me use this system at work, I’d refuse. There is no way I’m greeting my day with a picture of the veins inside my carpal-tunnel-twisted hand.

Sorry this video is a little long, but you get the drift. This little bastard can ride a rail all by himself and is designed to avoid cars and eventually marry your sister. Don’t ask me why, where, or how this came about, but it’s apparently a showcase for components maker MuRata.

Ever since the U.S. basically outlawed Booth Babes, I think our trade shows have become more serious, intelligent, and valuable. In unenlightened regions like Europa and Japanasia, however, their very presence is an insult to the strides women have made in the realms of commerce, education, medicine, and science and paint this proud people with the brush of misogyny and benighted attitudes about representations of women or, dare I say it, womyn. That said, here are some of the hot and bodacious booth babes of CEATEC 2007 showing their gams to a bunch of gimlet-eyed sararimen who wouldn’t know women’s suffrage if it bit them on the keister.

Fujitsu’s MediaTop is kind of like Microsoft Surface but with blocks. You use a Bluetooth-enabled cube that lets you control on-screen action in three dimensions. When you place the cube near the screen you can turn it to control the UI or use it like a 3D mouse. They even have a plan to give kids huge blocks so they can use them to interact with on-screen characters.

Can you guys see this? I ate four pieces of potentially bad sushi last night and now this thing has been following me around all morning asking for quarters.

Sony’s XEL-1 is pretty impressive. It’s only 27 inches wide and costs $1,500, so it’s not that impressive but if you want to be an early adopter and feel like your TV can get blown off the table with a strong gust of wind, this is your device.

OLEDs use less power and are more eco-friendly than plasma or LCD screens. Does this mean you’ll have an OLED in your home next year? Probably not. While it’s an amazing technology, they’ve been harping on this stuff for almost a decade and I can’t see them pumping these out any time soon. It’s nice to see Sony is experimenting and leading the OLED charge, but let’s not hold our collective breath.

Not to be confused with “beef curtains”

One thing CEATEC has a surfeit of is robots. They come in all sizes, from a twee bike-riding robot whose visage I cannot now find in my photo library to a set of guard robots that won’t do much guarding when you kick them over before they can alert the authorities. Then there was yesterday’s Sony Rolly, an embarrassment for all involved.

I grabbed photos of all the robots I could find and even interacted with a tentative little guide robot that eventually came back to my room with me and showed me the true meaning of “retractable claw.” It will be a summer wedding. My family will be there and Guardrobo will wear white, although I do believe I installed a third party app into her last night, if you get my drift.

Domo arrig… hey, put down that stick!

One can of Pokari Sweat, please.

NEC’s home robot — so cute, so unassuming, you’d be hard pressed to think it will soon be mining your body for precious bile.

Fujitsu’s Bar Robot — lulls you into a stupor, bashes your face in with a bottle of Old Parr

His mom dress him like this

Here’s a quick look at some of the huge Sharp screens. There was a really nice 102-inch model — you know, for oligarchs — the super-thin models, and some weird model that rises out like the Great Pumpkin. Not exciting, but cool enough. Check out the “52-inch” screen inside the 102-inch model.

Check out Darth’s Platform Sith Boots

…you start seeing Sith Lords and their entourage wandering the halls of a Japanese tech trade conference. BONUS – Click through to see me in 3D glasses praying for death.

How do they pee?

This is from the Dolby 3D video exhibit. It was actually very cool. Beowulf should be the first movie shot using the technology and you don’t have to update your screen if you’re a movie theater owner. Like IMAX++

Another concept device using a very cool system of see-through rollerballs and a back button to do just about anything. They had a few mock-ups and it really makes sense once you see how smoothly everything works with just a ball. Maybe the next iPod can get a scroll-ball?

This video of the Sony Rolly MP3 player sums up everything that is wrong with the former electronics giant — a lack of vision, the inability to produce products people want, and ham-handed attempts at fun that are quickly quashed by higher ups.

Thats, said, just look at that little bastard roll!

I was wandering around the show floor when I came upon this little gem. It’s a gesture-based 3D system that lets you control your dashboard GPS/radio with a wave of your finger. It’s over at the Carrozzeria booth, which is an offshoot of Pioneer. The icons that pop up float in 3D and you wave and bat at them like someone with delirium tremens to move them out of the way. It can’t be very safe for drivers.

I got a chance to circle the new ultra-slim sharp LCDs. They look amazing and they’re so damn thin it’s incredible. There’s one shot in there of an LCD sliding up out of some cabinet and it looks like a piece of paper popping up. These are truly flat screens.

I love the Qosmio line of Toshiba laptops and this collection of Gigabeats, phones, and cameras made me pee a little. Essentially the entire laptop line is very slick with unique touches like HDDVD playback and odd applications for music and photo viewing.

The Gigabeat line is hot as well. The MEV41 is a full-screen player while the tiny U103 with 1GB memory and voice recording. It comes in 5 colors and is about as small as two Shuffles stuck together.

To get an idea of what these guys are doing, take a look a the best of Apple UI design and add in some fast processors and HD. These UIs sit on top of Windows and all but hide it from view, creating some incredible interactive experiences.

The phones were a bit more disappointing. I’m glad to report that we’re fast catching up to the state-of-the-art and I wouldn’t trade the iPhone for any of the clamshells I spotted here. Go us.

WTF is Patlabor? Sounds like robots giving birth

1048 is Toshiba in numeric form – to = 10, shiba = 48.

The Gigabeat playing video

The black one on the left is a 32GB flash drive.

Qosmio kicking ass

Office 2007 Personal, now with more drum-playing ghosts

Tiny Gigabeat

Hey, Dog! Go fetch me some ugly, sub-par mobile phones from Toshiba.

Yeah, ummm… yeah. Looks like… umm… seriously. Who knows.

More crazy picture handling

Our first stop was a huge announcement by Panasonic about their line of DIGA Blu-Ray/DVD recorders. The recorders — BW700/800/900 on the Blu-Ray side and XW200V/100/300 on the DVD side — include monstrous hard drives and we’ll probably never see them over here.

The Blu-Ray series starts at 250GB and tops out at 1TB of internal storage. It records to DVD and Blu-Ray and includes i.Link/Firewire for attaching cameras and other devices. It supports full HDMI out at 1080p.


The DVD series tops out at 500GB and are quite slim at 59mm. The include 7.1 audio out and support AVCHD playback. There are a number of other features, including some crazy intercom mode that records people coming up to your house and ringing your doorbell, but that’s future boy stuff that we’ll get when our children are already colonizing Mars, so whatevs.

The best thing about these devices is that they compress HD video at amazing rates, resulting in about 18 hours on one 50GB disk and 381 hours onto the 1TB HDD. Amazingly, the XW200V model even has a VHS tape player in it.

Pricing is in the $1500-300 range although the BR models are up there in the 300,000 yen range AKA ‘spensive. Available November 1st in Asia, in your dreams in the U.S. These are some severely hard core set-top boxes, especially the 1TB models, so expect some of this tech to trickle down to us over the next few months.