Here's a rather interesting new portable media player from NEC, of all companies. It's based o­n a perfume.

Thinner than Motorola's RAZR? Yep. NEC has a new phone coming out that has an 11.9mm thickness -- the RAZR has a thickness of 13.71mm, so it's been beaten.

We can't find an actual model number for this phone, but it is a GSM/GPRS handset that will be sold outside of Japan by NEC.

NEC Infrontia will be releasing an "industrial PDA" that can withstand a 1.5 meter drop to concrete, features dust/water proofing, and is compatible with good stuff like RFID tags and QR codes.

Keitai Watch continues their coverage of Wireless Japan 2005, but o­ne thing in particular that caught my eye was this concept phone o­n display from NEC. I have no idea where you would put your mouth to talk into the thing, but we'll assume that the future involves some sort of wireless solution. There's a couple other nice looking handsets o­n display at the show, such as the card-sized N930 for the Chinese market. Click the image below to continue to their article.

NEC has announced the world's first "tasting" robot. It is surprisingly accurate, too, able to distinguish between different types of cheese and bread. My taste buds work fine, and I still can't do that.

Another feature of the robot is its ability to offer advice. If its analysis concludes that there is a certain percentage of fat in the food, it will actually let you know that you're turning into a fatty. And since it's a robot, you don't have to worry about it reserving its judgement!

NEC has developed a 2.7" touchscreen with QVGA (320 x 240) resolution, planned for use o­n smartphones and similar devices.

Here's a new palm-sized transceiver from NEC with a throughput of about 1Gbps. This allows for uncompressed HDTV signals.

I thought those 64-chord ringers were enough, but NEC didn't. They went ahead and developed a 128-chord chip with support for 3D surround sound (as is included in the FOMA 901i series).

NEC has a new line of compact tower PCs intended for business users, equipped with the Intel 915GV chipset.

So what's to like? The 66mm form factor.

NEC has struck another blow for the HD DVD camp in their battle against the Blu-Ray "evil doers" with their development of a prototype drive for PCs that supports CD, DVD and HD DVD. The HD DVD support is read-only at the moment but write support is on the way. Take that Blu-Ray scum!

Well, here's some new line of recycled PCs from NEC which feature enhanced security options. I feel so secure.

I'm a bit sidetracked watching the voting results come out, but here's two new phones intended for the Chinese market from NEC. The first is the "N940" which is the country's first phone capable of receiving TV broadcasts, and the "N840" with a 2MP camera.

NEC will be showing this notebook PC at this year's WPC EXPO, which operates off of a fuel cell. It gets a somewhat acceptable 10 hour battery life, though I doubt consumers will be expected to accept the technology until it's better than lithium ion.

We've seen LCD monitors with billion-color capabilities before, but NEC's new TFT display module is strikingly different:

-It can display 1.7347 billion colors simultaneously (previous models could display o­nly 16 million colors)
-It can choose those colors from a total of 685 billion

While we're o­n the topic of HD DVD, it appears NEC Electronics has announced the world's first LSI for recording and reading HD DVDs. You can also record to existing CDs and DVDs, but o­nce HD DVD products start hitting the market (2006 and 2007), I don't think you'll be doing that anymore anyway.

Is it me, or is 3D display technology actually taking off?

The N610 and N620 are GSM phones specifically developed for the Chinese market by NEC.
With the addition of the touchscreen, NEC has dropped the typical 10-key layout, and added handwriting recognition for Chinese characters.
English handwriting recognition blows enough as it is, and there's o­nly 26 letters. I can't imagine what Chinese recognition would be like - I think the average Chinese person knows like 4,000 characters.

English press release ahoy, mateys.
It was less than a year ago I was translating my first ever article for TechJapan, about an 8x DVD+R drive from Plextor.
However, this is o­nly an LSI. Can we expect DVD writing speed to double yearly?

We previously reported o­n this LCD's module. NEC-Mitsubishi hasn't released a product image yet either, it seems.
The screens can create up to o­ne billion colors.

I guess if I used Photoshop I'd understand the value of a screen supporting this "Adobe RGB."
This is just a module, mind you - not an actual screen. But the screen is the easy part.
The module supports 1600 x 1200 (UXGA).

NEC announced some new models today, and they sure are impressive.

First is the TZ series which... has a whole lot of stuff. A 23" LCD (with SoundVu nonetheless), 64-bit Athlon, extensive multimedia capabilities, Radeon 9600, etc.

Next is the S series, which I imagine is NEC's answer to Sony's Vaio W series. It features the same sort of screen/case integration form factor, but has some other good stuff.

More information inside, inclunding links to the ultra-cool 3D product images.

It's called the "LookClub," and it's a not a PC, but it's not a PDA either. I guess that makes it close to a Sony AirBoard? Although not really.
It does, however, use Linux, and is suprisingly affordable. But don't expect to be able to get your hands o­n o­ne soon - NEC will o­nly produce 4,000 of these this year.
More information and an image of the device inside.

I saw this posted over at Gizmodo yesterday, and forgot to let you guys know.
NEC has an English page up of some of their ideas for future designs. There's a bendable cellular phone, some rather odd applications of images, the "pen" based computer, etc.

The page is in English, so enjoy.

NEC announced their new LSI today, which is the industry's first to support all functions of video/audio processing involved in DVD recording.

Although NEC previously announced o­ne of these phones, this is the first time I've seen the other two.
The first time I saw the picture of the N910, I thought "hey that looks like a Gameboy Advance SP."

They formed a company with Samsung SDI back in 2001, but they're dropping all resources, and letting Samsung go it alone.

NEC will be releasing 17 and 23 inch widescreen LCDs, which use SoundVu technology to make the panel itself act as a speaker.
The screens are to be sold alone - previously, the screens were packaged with the VALUESTAR line of PCs.
Also, they will begin a 3D display service for FFXI players who use LaVie S notebooks.

NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology have cooperated to develop technology which allows for phones with cameras - even low resolution cameras - to act as scanners, by having users move their camera over the surface of the page.

It certainly looks nifty, but I guess you'll have to go to China to use o­ne.
Oh, and if the success of the N-Gage is any indicator, then things that aren't shaped like phones don't work sell as well as phones.
Still, cool idea. And it's got a damn 3 megapixel camera. Pictures and more information inside.

This is a 61" screen designed for business uses. Not o­nly does it cost $20,000, it supports resolutions of up to 1,365 x 768.

(Nippon Electric Company) NEC will begin shipping the industry's first terrestrial digital/BS Digital/100 degrees CS digital, digital video supporting desktop PC, the "ValueStar TX" (VX980/8F) on January 29th. The price is open, but expected retail price is projected at around 500,000 yen.

The robot can translate from Japanese to English, and the other way around.
I guess the biggest question is, can it really? We all know how crappy most voice recognition is...

So you can both read and write both HD DVDs and normal DVDs, with the same drive. I guess HD DVDs will be popular in the next few years. As far as I can tell, it's o­ne of the few technologies that offers some competition to Blu-Ray discs.