The "Words Gear" is a new portable book reader/media player from Panasonic sporting a 5.6" display with a resolution of 1024 x 600. The "E Sensor" that sits next to the screen is a touch-sensitive control device shaped like the letter E, allowing you to control the device's functions with one finger.

The Words Gear can handle audio, video, still images, and electronic books stored on cards inserted in its SD card slot. It supports "SD-ePublish," which supports CPRM, for copyright protected content. The battery life is about 6 hours.

Slated to launch in tandem with the new device is a new company jointly established by Panasonic, Kadokawa Mobile, and Tokyo Broadcasting, dubbed the "Words Gear Corporation." The company will be handling the production and distribution of content for the device, primarily via saidoku.com, whose "image character" is none other than Kaori Manabe. Hubba hubba.



Inspired by:
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0926/pana.htm

Press Release 1:
http://panasonic.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/jn060926-1/jn060926-1.html

Press Release 2:
http://panasonic.co.jp/corp/news/official.data/data.dir/jn060926-2/jn060926-2.html

Finally, there were no less than three "Lumix" digital still cameras announced by Panasonic today: the LS2, TZ1, and FX01.

Panasonic has announced a new portable projector with an SD card slot, making it the smallest and lightest such projector in the world.

Panasonic's new "DVD-LX97" portable DVD player is the first in Japan (and thus the world) with support for "One-Seg" terrestrial digital broadcasts.

Panasonic's new batteries have 20% longer life, and can operate in colder temperatures. This can mean o­nly o­ne thing: put them in a plane.

One of the primary advantages Blu-ray has versus HD DVD is the fact that the discs support multiple layers. Sony said they're working on discs with as many as 8 layers, bringing the total capacity to 200GB. Nice.

But before we get there, we need to dual and quadruple layer discs first. Panasonic has announced they've begun initial production of the former, and they'll be shipping out sample units before the end of the year. They already have an English press release available, so go ahead and take a look if you're interested.

We're getting awfully close to switching from DVD to either Blu-ray or HD DVD. Are you ready? Apparently Panasonic is; they'll be shipping Blu-ray drives for your PC as early as January of next year.

That portable SD card copier we talked about a while back? It was officially announced by Panasonic today. It will be released on October 21st, and Impress Watch estimates it will cost around 4,000 yen. The official name is "SD Pocket Copy." Otherwise, everything seems to be the same from when we first looked at it. Here's the official Panasonic press release, and the DC Watch article if you're just clamoring for more information.

How often have you found yourself with two SD cards, wanting to make a copy of what is o­n o­ne card, but not had a PC in sight? Never? Oh, well me too.

But I take it some of you out there will appreciate a new product Matsushita demoed at their recent LUMIX announcement event. Take two SD cards, plug them into the device, and whammo, the contents are copied from o­ne card to the other.

The KX-PX100 from Panasonic is a small photo printer that features an SD slot in order to print pictures immediately after taking them with your camera. It measures a mere 210 x 279 x 100mm, and supports standard photo paper sizes.

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!

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.

Matsushita announced today the release of the world's first dual layer Blu-Ray recorder. 50GB o­n a single disc isn't bad.

Media costs about $70 USD though

I'm pretty sure "external recording control" isn't the right terminology, but oh well. You can use your browser, or your cell phone, to control your DVD recorder through the Dimora network beginning today. The catch? Well, it costs money, and you have to be using a Matsushita "Diga" series DVD recorder.
Still, this is an excellent idea, especially for someone who doesn't pay attention to TV scheduling in advance.

Panasonic has announced a new CD player which supports MP3, and o­ne that doesn't.

Days of media silence from Asia continue, as Golden Week goes o­n until the 5th. Normal news will resume o­n the 6th, but there may be a hiccup o­n the 7th as I will be going back to Altanta.
I give you this image, of a P252iS car:

This image comes from this ASCII article. I didn't know they had Shriners in Japan.

Matsushita Electrical Industries Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, and Sony Corporation have announced the Blu-ray ROM production COULD be as low as that of DVD-ROM production.

Here's a pretty interesting idea from Matsushita - it's an LCD projector that supports simultaneous display of information from up to 4 different computers, via wireless connection.

Matsushita announced that they will release a 1GB SD memory card.
Greenhouse announced the same sort of card a while back, but this is Panasonic! Cmon!

This is the first time something like this has been done, according to Matsushita. It writes DVD+R, DVD-R, and some other formats you probably won't ever use. Seriously, who uses DVD-RAM anyway?

Matsushita is hot to trot with their new machine that has enough features to keep o­ne busy for years. But it comes at a cost, as usual - about $1100 USD.

This time around are two portable DVD players.

The first o­ne (DVD-LX8) has an LCD, and supports a wide range of media - even those stored o­n a SD memory card.

The next o­ne (DVD-PS3) does not have an LCD, but is the world's smallest portable DVD player.

More information o­n and pictures of both models inside.

The digital video camera will record to 8cm DVD-RAM/R discs, and can even record in widescreen for you amateur film makers.

The LSI is o­ne chip that handles the world's three primary TV standards - PAL, SECAM, and NTSC.

So it's a turntable that's plated with 24 karat gold.
Yes, you too can get your bling² o­n for o­nly 90,000 yen.

A whole 15% improvement in battery life.
I guess it's worth it to someone.

This seems like a simple concept, but anyone who has owned small headphones (and needed to put them somewhere small) will realize that this is pretty useful. The cable for the headphones winds up inside of each earpiece.

That's right, previous MOS sensors at 1/4 inch were o­nly 0.35MP. Matsushita plans to begin mass production by this Fall.

Its life is reportedly 1.5 times that of traditional alkaline batteries. This release represents the first advancement over Alkaline batteries in 40 years. More details inside.

It's 200 hours if you feel like spending extra money o­n it, via external batteries. Right off the shelf, it gets 40 hours from the included NiCds.
No OGG support yet...other details inside.

Matsushita Electronic Industries, Inc. has developed an MPEG4 Codec LSI called the "Marvie 3(MN195906)". They will begin shipments of the sample units in October, for a price of 5,000 yen.