Continuing with the portable DVD player news is two new ones from Panasonic, the "DVD-LX95" and "DVD-LS90." They're far more expensive than the 20,000 yen Evergreen model we talked about, but thankfully make up for the price difference by offering a far more complete package.

Four new notebooks from Panasonic: the T4, W4, R4, and Y4. Quick breakdown of each inside.

Panasonic has introduced a fleet of new audio devices today. Two are portable, and o­ne is not.

• The "SV-SD100V" and "SV-SD90" portable players with SD memory card slot
• The "SC-PM910DVD" and "SC-PM710SD" with mini-component system SD writing capabilities
• The "SV-MP730V" and "SV-MP720V" portable players with flash memory

Three new CD receivers from Panasonic - two of which aren't very interesting. The top-end "CD-C7301D", however, makes up for the mediocrity of the other two with a variable colour display (choose from one of 9,261 possibilities) and the ability to customise the display's background, startup and shutdown screens.

Panasonic has added two new models to their "TOUGHBOOK" range of sturdy notebook PCs that can survive a 90 cm fall - when powered off. One of them also has a screen that can be rotated up to 180 degrees.

My workflow for creating these TechJapan articles involves making a large list of links to source articles, press releases and such. As you can imagine, o­n a day like today where I'm trying to make up for not posting for the past two days, this list gets sort of large. Since I would easily lose track of which articles are which if I o­nly recorded the links, I also write a couple words describing the articles to refresh my memory.

For this article, all I wrote was "A TAPE PLAYER."

A micrometer is between millimeter and nanometer, for those of you not familar with the metric units of measurement. Doing a bit of research, I found that a virus is about 0.25μm (micrometers) in length. Fantastic.

So this is an image sensor with what Matsushita is calling the "smallest pixel area in the world." I think they're right. Note that the entire image sensor itself isn't 2 micrometers -- just the pixels themselves are.

As I've said many times before, Japan likes to establish industry-wide standards for seemingly every technology-related aspect of a person's life. Here's a case in point: Sony, Matsushita Electric, and Mitsubishi have announced they're creating "Powerline Communication Alliance."

The goal of the alliance? Establishment of interoperability standards for delivery of high-resolution video contents, IP phone, and so forth through the power lines already existing in households. Say that three times fast.

I don't think "bleeding edge" applies in this situation; we'll just say it's off the edge entirely.

Here's a new 3G phone from Panasonic intended for overseas markets. Looks pretty nice, except for the fact that there's o­nly concept art.

Also, I hate flip phones as they are in the USA. The o­nly way I could possibly be interested in buying o­ne is if it had a dual-axis hinge (like o­n the W21SA or P900iV) -- but this feature is yet to come to American phones.

Matsushita Electric will begin sales of the "SJ-MR50" portable MD recorder from 25 November. It's the world's smallest and lightest MD recorder with an internal microphone and speaker! Well, what are you waiting for? You know you want one!