TechJapan has been in limbo since April of this year, partly because of some personal conflicts I've been having with myself over the goals and target audience of the site.

sar7501 and I intend on continuing TechJapan, and look to relaunch the site over the next few months. We plan on implementing a redesign of the site and a new way of displaying the content itself. The very nature of the content will also be changed. We're aiming to decrease our reliance on translation of articles from Japanese websites, and we plan on increasing the volume of news coming out of TechJapan. Given the emphasis I've taken on creating original content over at PSP-Vault, it doesn't make sense that TechJapan consist almost entirely of news articles just translated from those articles on Japanese websites. Now that the TechJapan Corporation exists, I no longer have to concern myself over conflicts of interests that may have arisen during my time writing for other sites. As a result, managing the TechJapan Corporation will be my sole occupation (besides school), at least until I graduate in December of 2007.

If you have any thoughts on the matter, please feel free to post them in this article's comments. Thanks for your continued patronage.

Update: I've removed all advertising from the site. Makes me feel a little bit better.

I don't really have anything to what has already been said over at Engadget about Toshiba's World Cup laptop, and Logitec's Mac compatible Blu-ray drive. They've managed to cover the bases pretty well.

Just in case you're looking for reference information (writing a report?), here are the PC Watch articles about each respective product:
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0424/toshiba.htm
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0424/logitec.htm

If you've ever complained about the screen of your portable DVD player being too small, this might be the product for you. The screen of Bluedot's new "BDP-1200" portable DVD player makes you wonder why the word "portable" still applies.

If you're too lazy to take your blank discs out of their spindles, here's the product for you. It's a "CD/DVD blank media dispenser." Push a button and out pops a blank disc, ready for burning.

You've watched the entirety of the Neon Genesis Evangelion series, including the crappy movies, you own the Neon Genesis Evangelion iPod... so what's the next logical step? The Neon Genesis Evangelion bicycle, of course! Details inside.

Clarion has announced the first line of car navigation products for the Japanese market. They offer integrated hard drives, 7" widescreen LCDs, linkage with 5th gen iPods for audio and video playback,  and even terrestrial digital tuners.

Willcom has announced a new blog service for their "full browser" handsets. Apparently the Sharp W-ZERO3 isn't supported yet, but it's o­n the horizon.

I've put up a poll to gather some feedback about the format of news here on TechJapan. Since we launched in December of 2003, a large majority of the 1,280 articles we've posted were translated from Japanese news sources. Depending on your feedback, that could change. What would you like to see out of TechJapan? More of the same? A higher volume of news by avoiding intricate technical details of each and every product? More analysis, commentary, or explanations about the products and services we discuss? Please post your vote in the poll you see in the sidebar of the site.

Depending on your response and those of your peers, you could be seeing a different format for news coming out of TechJapan.

Two characters from a Fuji TV kids program called "Ponki Kids" are coming soon to an iPod nano near you.

Here are four new digital cameras from Nikon: the P3, P4, S5, and S6. o­ne of the P series cameras features integrated wireless LAN, and the S series also uses a "Wave Surface Design."