Panasonic announced that they would ship a new TV of its Viera series. This CF5, which is planned to be sold late June has a Nanoe generator, which converts water into Nanoe Ion wrapped in water molecules. Panasonic claims that the ion suppresses fungi, mites and pollen, removes odor and realizes “Uruoi Bihada Kuukan”, which means “moist beautiful-skin field” in Japanese.
Having been pressured for years by plain-vanilla inexpensive TV from other Asian countries, Japanese TV vendors seem to lose ideas how to differentiate their rather expensive products by what features they add. And from US, there are new generation TV experiences coming which do not care hardware features but software integration over the Internet.
Panasonic’s new SR-SX2 Series (SR-SX102-RK black, SR-SX-102-W white, SR-SX182-RK black/large, SR-SX182-W white/large) is the Japan’s first, and I believe the world’s first, smartphone-controlled rice cooker.
On top of the all high-end features such like “200 Celsius degree steam”, “Great-power dancing boil(Dai karyoku odori-daki)”, “Diamond Furnace(Daiyamondo Kamado)”, it newly supports settings-by-smartphone. Holding your FeliCa supported Android over the blue mark on the rice cooker sets rice type, cooking variations and timer. You may pre-set maximum 6 patterns of your family’s favorite steamed rice as well.
You may also connect your Android to the Panasonic’s cooking receipe cloud server [J], search and touch to give the cooking instructions to the cooker. In reverse, you may keep 100 of your recipes on the cloud server.
Felica is Japan/Sony’s contact-less RFID system, used in Japanese cellphones and e-money, also a part of NFC specification. Most of Android handsets sold in Japan by Japanese manufacturers support it under the name “Osaifu Ketai”(cellphone wallet).
The market price of the former model SR-SX101 is about 50,000 yen (US$600) according to the web.
The top listed 10 did not change, but at 11th, Apple Japan is ranked up from 2009’s 33rd, which is likely by a lot of iPhone/iPad exposure on news and ads by Softbank.
As you notice, Yahoo! Japan, which is much stronger than Google Japan here, is quite unpopular as a working place in compare. Amazon Japan also gets distanced from its rival Rakuten from the point of view of potential workers’ popularity.
Sharp, Panasonic Mobile, Fujitsu, NEC, Kyocera, Sony-Ericsson, Apple, Toshiba, Casio, LG and others
2008 market share by the same MM Research was here [J],
Sharp, Panasonic Mobile, NEC, Fujitsu, Sony-Ericsson, Toshiba and others
As always, English media like Bloomberg already reportedApple Captured 72% of Japan Smartphone Market in 2009. There, “only the smartphone” share was picked up and said Apple got 72% of Japan, without telling what smartphone means here in Japan.
The definition of “smartphone” is vague even among Japanese. Japanese Wikipedia [J] says that smartphone means that the phone has any of these operating system; “Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Palm OS and Palm WebOS”. That is, all non-Japanese OS.
Apple built up their 4.9% share in few years is a great achievement in this crookedly-evolved competitive cellphone market, even though it was initially supported by loyal users of Macintosh and iPod, both had succeeded more than world average in Japan, and exclusive partner Softbank Mobile’s aggressive “Substantially Free” campaign, which is now being extended over a year.
But honestly, I dislike English media repeat posting “latest iPhone domination in Japan” news with misleading number, which should not be good also for serious foreign companies who are thinking how they should go into Japanese mobile market. You must support Japanese cellphone… yet.
As the first presenter of the conference, Atsuki Ishida[J], CEO of FreeBit, a Shibuya-based venture company known for providing its network platform to many VNO/ISPs (virtual network operator/Internet service providers), introduced ServersMan which is their iPhone/iPod app recently upgraded to ver. 3.0b. (See these articles for more details about the app.) Its Android app is now under development.
qik Video: Atsuki Ishida’s Presentation (in Japanese)
Compared to the specification of typical web servers which were being used a decade ago, iPhone has a sufficient CPU power and network bandwidth to work as a web server. Besides, iPhone adopts Linux as an operating system. Mr. Ishida convicted of the potentiality of iPhone as a web server. If iPhone can be used as a server, a mount rack storing several servers would be changed as follows (five layers of iPhone devices). It requires less electricity consumption, less waste heat and less space than a typical rack-mount server – which mean it’s totally ecological.
FreeBit’s basic concept in this developing project is to “server-ize” all things surrounding us. Since ServersMan uses IPv6 address method for assigning addresses to devices, possible emerging needs of assigning many addresses will not cause the lack of IP address.
Takuma Iwasa[J], CEO of Cerevo[J], an Akihabara-based start-up and tech home appliance developer, unveiled their new concept digital camera which will be on sale in several months. After shooting a number of pictures with the camera, you don’t have to get it out from your bag for uploading pictures and sharing them with your friends. When you come back home, that camera will automatically detect WiFi signal at your home and upload recent pictures to Cerevo’s photo management website, Flickr and other social web services.
qik Video: Takuma Iwasa’s Presentation (in Japanese)
In order to prevent you from having an accident that you cannot use the camera because of dead battery, you’ll be alerted by a cellphone e-mail when the camera’s battery remaining breaks 10% of its capacity and encourage you to recharge it.
Today he unveiled the camera would have a USB port to accept 3G mobile data modem, which allows you to upload your pictures you take not only within WiFi coverage area but also in the most of populated area of the world. The camera is now under manufacturing at a factory in Mainland China, and it will be available in several months at Cerevo’s e-commerce shop, branches at Rakuten and Amazon Japan. Expecting retail price will be JPY20,000 (USD210) approximately.
