Matsushita isn't exactly known very well as a PC peripherals maker, so it appears that with this new drive, they might be o­n to something.

This is allegedly the "industry's first" DVD super multi drive capable of writing DVD+R DL that can operate off of bus power.

Matsushita Electric has added a couple of new models to their range of Strada car navigation systems - the HDD-based 2DIN CN-HDS930MD and the DVD-based CN-DS110. Both systems have an "Entertainment Bank" function that allows the playback of MPEG4, MP3 and JPEG files.

Matsushita Electric has downgraded the optical drives in their lightweight Let'snote notebook series and removed their recommended retail price. The Y2 and W2 Let'snotes now come standard with DVD combo drives instead of Super-Multi DVD drives. This sounds like an attempt by Panasonic to re-invigorate sales of these Let'snote models. The Super-Multi DVD drive equipped models obviously haven't been selling as well as they would like.

We've heard about various memory-card based contactless IC solutions, and this is the first I know of that supports SecureDigital. Swell.

It also supports FeliCa applications, so if you were thinking about upgrading to o­ne of those new 900iC series phones, think harder.

According to a "Panasonic SD Card Roadmap" shown at Photokina today, Panasonic plans o­n having 15GB SecureDigital cards by 2007.

I just can't stop myself from reporting o­n these high-speed flash memories, for some reason.

This time around, we have 20MB/sec SecureDigital media from Matsushita (Panasonic).

The way I understood this article, Matsushita has developed a standard platform from which developers can implement changes to AV products all across the board, rather than having to integrate functionality into each product individually.
Let's say, for example, a company decides they want to include OGG decoding in their line of products. The process they follow would be like "develop firmware for CD player, develop firmware for MP3 player, develop firmware for DVD player"... o­n and o­n for each product they want to add that functionality to.
With this new Matsushita platform, however, you can supposedly use the same software (thus firmware?) from o­ne product to the next - so said company could instead release a generic firmware upgrade for all of their products introducing OGG support. That would be

I haven't seen toilet technology come too far in my lifetime, so I welcome anything that makes my "experience" that much better.

According to Matsushita, this john has a "comfortable sitting feeling," and apparently holds the title of the "industry's largest." There's a couple interesting features o­n this setup.

Pretty cheap, and a BOATLOAD of battery life.
They also have some sort of feature that "restores data cut by MP3 compression," and the "D.Sound Engine," but I generally ignore stuff like this because I find it doesn't really do anything worthwhile.

Today has been a very slow day, so I just thought I'd write about this.

You may remember Dimora, Matsushita's external recording control service, so that users could set their Diga DVR devices to record certain programs with the use of o­nly specifc iAppli for the DoCoMo phones.
Using that same network architecture, Matsushita has done something for baseball fans. You can search the contents of recorded baseball games from your phone - for example, if you wanted to see Mr. Fujisawa's 7th inning homer, you find the appropriate entry o­n your phone, and your DVR will play it back for you. It's more or less just an indexing service.