Did you ever ask yourself where the fruit you are about to buy in the supermarket comes from? If yes a new “fruit identification system”, developed by NEC, might be the right solution for you. The technology allows you to identify the origin of a given fruit by taking a picture of it with your phone’s camera. → Read More
Have you ever tried pushing buttons on your music player while you’re out jogging or reaching for your cell phone when you’re stuck in a crowded train? It’s not a nice experience and a problem that NEC is trying to solve with a new system [press release in English] that is supposed to let you control consumer electronics by tapping your arm. → Read More
NEC today announced it has developed the industry’s first contact-less biometric authentication system that can read both fingerprints and finger veins. According to the company, the “HS100-10 Contactless Hybrid Finger Scanner” is extremely difficult to deceive and makes it possible to authenticate people with close to 100% accuracy. → Read More
On Monday, we’ve just shown you some leaked pictures, but we can now confirm the world’s thinnest smartphone, NEC Casio Mobile’s MEDIAS N-04C, is real. And provider NTT Docomo, Japan’s biggest mobile carrier, doesn’t want to lose time in bringing it to market: it will hit stores over here as early as March 15. → Read More
NEC is apparently to unveil the “world’s thinnest smartphone” (7.7mm) on Thursday, if a “leak” covered on a Japanese blog today is to be believed. That leak, reported today by Akihabara News, is actually a few days old (see this Japanese blog post, for example). → Read More
I’m not sure zoom noise was really the most pressing concern (I’m more worried about feature bloat and low-light capability, personally), but apparently NEC thought it was worth looking into. They’ve created some tech, apparently already employed by the Casio ZR10, that knows what noise the zoom mechanism makes and works to cancel it out while you’re shooting movies. → Read More
The dual-screen Android device NEC showed off at CES wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser. Without the latest version of Android, and sporting a rather low five hours of battery life, there wasn’t much to get excited about. But I like the idea of two discrete screens a la the Entourage Edge and the ill-fated Courier. NEC decided it’s an interesting form factor for medical software, of all things. → Read More
First a LifeTouch-branded Android tablet, now a netbook: NEC took the wraps off the so-called LifeTouch Note [JP] today, a netbook with Android 2.2 and a 7-inch LCD touchscreen on board. → Read More
The world gets yet another 3D device. Today, NEC in Japan announced [JP] a new 3D notebook, as part of the company’s spring line-up of PCs for the local market. It’s the last in a series of 3D-enabled laptops we’ve seen in the last few months. → Read More
Big shake-up in the PC industry: Yesterday, the country’s biggest PC maker NEC and Lenovo announced a plan to form a joint venture to create Japan’s largest “PC group”. Lenovo will hold a 51% stake in the joint venture (to be incorporated in the Netherlands), while NEC will own the rest. → Read More
NEC subsidiary NEC Avio has developed a thermometer [JP] that measures the user’s temperature without them having to touch the device. As the world’s first device of its kind, it captures your temperature via a built-in infrared sensor and integrates a desktop mirror (hence the name “Thermo Mirror”). → Read More
In June this year, NEC started showcasing an Android tablet called LifeTouch. Originally scheduled to go on sale in Japan in October, the device now has a new release date [JP]: “sometime this month” (you can see the final design on the picture). Unlike most other tablets, NEC now says they will market the LifeTouch exclusively to businesses (the initial plan was to offer it to individuals, too). → Read More
Japan’s biggest business daily, The Nikkei, is reporting that NEC has developed a technology that makes it possible to quickly change low-res analog video to HD video. According to NEC, the existing solutions out there require one full month to convert one hour of analog video images into HD images. → Read More
NEC is working on face recognition technology that helps detecting human faces even if they have aged substantially or gained weight over the years. In a benchmark test [PDF] conducted by the US Department of Homeland Security, the technology boasted 92% accuracy from a 1.6 million person criminal database, and 95% accuracy from a 1.8 million person database consisting of visa applicants. → Read More
We’ve shown you the LifeTouch [JP], NEC’s first stab at making a touchscreen tablet PC, on Monday, and now we got pointed to a video that shows the device in action. To recap, the LifeTouch is a seven-inch Android 2.1-based tablet running on an ARM Cortex A8 CPU (more info). → Read More
A number of Japanese companies, for example NTT, have announced or hinted at tablet PCs in the past months, but NEC is the first to actually name, spec and date its first model. Dubbed LifeTouch [JP], the NEC tablet will feature a 7-inch TFT LCD screen (800×480 resolution), weigh 400 grams, and run on Android 2.1. → Read More
And yet another 3D-related news item. This time, it’s NEC (or NEC Display Technologies, to be more exact), which today announced [JP] a new 3D-enabled DLP projector. The announcement comes not even one week after the company priced and spec’d their 3D-powered desktop PC. → Read More
Valuestar N VN790/BS – that’s the name of the 3D PC that NEC today announced [JP] for the Japanese market. The company’s faster than expected: just last month, NEC teased such a machine in Tokyo, saying it’s likely to ship by October 2010. But Japan will get the PC as early as next month. And it appears to be a pretty cool machine. → Read More
Software that helps to detect “illegal” video content on the web automatically isn’t really new, but NEC claims its technology has two selling points that sets it apart from similar solutions: speed and accuracy. The company says its system can identify pirated video material in a “matter of seconds”, with a detection rate of 96% and at a false alarm rate of just five in one million cases. → Read More
NEC has developed an eco-friendly cooling system for CPUs, claiming the technology [JP] uses uses 60% less energy than a water-cooling system and even 80% less than an air-cooling system. The core of the system is a liquid chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) substitute, which circulates around the CPU to draw away heat and has low greenhouse effects. → Read More
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