K-Tai Watch recently went to this "Business Show Tokyo 2004" where Vodafone has a booth, and they've got a bunch of mockups of these concept phones I reported o­n a couple weeks ago. Also, they had some working models of the Summer 2004 phones. Some of these look damn cool!

There's 5 models - two from Sharp (V602SH & V402SH), o­ne from Toshiba (V601T), o­ne from Sanyo (V401SA), and o­ne from Mitsubishi Electric (V401D).
"World's firsts" this time around include an optical zoom, which goes well with the 2MP camera o­n the V602SH. The Mitsubishi model also has a 2MP camera, and the phone can be operated by "finger tracing."
Since vodafone has a pretty detailed press release available in English (PDF which seems to have some copy protection ), I'll just make a couple of notes about each phone and put some pictures with it.

This o­ne's in English:

http://www.vodafone.jp/english/release/2004/040506e.pdf

A bit different from DoCoMo's contactless smart card (Felica) I believe. The vodafone version has been jointly developed with Sharp, and uses a flash memory card plugged into the slot o­n the phone to achieve these capabilities.
Backwards compatibility, anyone? It would be nice if users could simply plug a flash memory card into their phone and have it able to use smart card services, but something tells me there's more to it than that.

These aren't past the drawing board yet...literally.
I'm going to post as much as I can. Not much information has been revealed about these yet, obviously, so...just look at the pictures and say "ooh" and "ahh" for now. There's 7 models altogether. Also, I cannot post pictures of these, as vodafone hasn't made any press releases yet. So I'll just link to the o­nes from Impress Watch.

No, I don't like this as much as the INFOBAR. It still looks pretty nifty though.

So vodafone is releasing a new phone in Japan...
Not o­nly does it have an integrated TV tuner, it has the ability to record up to 12 minutes of TV programming.
Ah, I miss my J-Phone

This o­ne's for our European visitors to this site. I noticed an article today over at ASCII24  where they had a bunch of pictures of the new vodafone "flagship shop" that opened up in Shibuya recently.
I won't go into much detail unless someone requests it, but the 5 story building is much more than just another shop to get/change your phone. You can try out contents, get accessories, etc.
Take a look at the place o­n this page.

Vodafone and Spicy Software hosted a conference to discuss the state of V-Applications in the cell phone market in Japan. Also discusses was the drive to move the Java specification to a more unified model. Three other companies were present to give talks as well, Taito, Alpha Technology Communications, and IAJ.