Completely by accident, if you can believe that, we found ourselves at Sony's press launch for their new Walkman players in Tokyo this evening. Eschewing the Jobs approach of building things up with a presentation before whipping out the goods at the end, Sony simply had a troupe of models walking around from the get-go showing off the new hard disk players, the NW-A1000 and NW-A3000. Unfortunately for them, it seemed like most of the several hundred guests were music journalists more interested in the chance to see Franz Ferdinand play some songs from their new album, and Franz rather stole the new Walkmans' thunder.

Read on for a few shots of the festivities.

[UPDATE: Seems we maligned Sony by implying they hadn't done a launch presentation—we had cadged an invitation from Sony Music to the Franz live performance and didn't get wind of the Walkman launch, so, er, seems we just turned up too late. We've apprised SME of our interest in gadgets for next time.]

For reasons best known to themselves, the Japanese government's National Institute of Communications Technology has seen fit to invent some speakers that you can plug into a network via an Ethernet cable, from which they also suck up power. Apparently it's possible to beam sound to them wirelessly, though the ITmedia report doesn't go into any more detail. They come with Windows drivers and some audio routing software, but we're just gonna assume this is a little more of a "we did it because we could" kind of thing.

RFID tags, Bluetooth, WiFi? Forget it. This week, Japan's Ministry of Land is demoing a technology at Kansai Airport that will transmit information to cellphones using the LED or fluorescent lights in the departure lounge. NTT DoCoMo is supplying the phones, while NEC, Matsushita, Keio University and Japan Airlines chip in on the remaining technology. Passengers will point the phones at the appropriate blinkenlights around the lounge to get information on departure times and shops and facilities, and to download music and video. Throughput is reckoned at 10Kbps from a fluorescent light and several Mbps from an LED. As long as they don't try and adapt the same technology to reprogram our minds while they're at it, we're happy.

Japan has a solid record of using RFID and GPS to track its kids, oldies and pets, but Kokuyo's Doko Line service ups the paranoia level a notch. Not only will it send an email to your Mum if you step outside a predefined 300m-5km zone, it'll also inform the support center at your local radio station in order to mobilize the community in a search for your wayward ass. Kokuyo plans to sell them to schools, care facilities and medical institutions to track the inmates, and the GPS box that comes with the service also includes a panic button and attack alarm. The unit will sell for Y29,800 ($270), with service costing you a further Y1,500 ($14) a month.

Japanese firm Speecys has had an eponymously-named robot out in kit form for a while now, but they've just announced an update that creates what they claim is the world's first fuel-cell powered bipedal robot. The Speecys-FC comes in a little taller and heavier than its 50-cm, 3.7kg predecessor, and also gets a hefty kick up in price, to Y2.62 million ($24,000) from Y500,000 ($4,500). We wish we could say it does something cooler than walking around and being powered by hydrogen, but unfortunately that's about it. The hydrogen is fed to the fuel cells from a 16-mL tank in the robot's head, though, so you know what to shoot at should it ever get delusions about world domination.

Booth babes we've heard of, but quite why Taiwanese CPU cooler manufacturer Thermaltake felt compelled to field an army of helmeted geeks (CPU-fan-cooled helmets, no less) at Computex last week is totally beyond us. NVIDIA apparently one-upped them with a stand where you could get a cone of green ice cream for yelling the company's slogan into a megaphone, though.

Seems the recent news that the iTunes Music Store would finally hit Japan in 2005 was right on the nose: according to this morning's Nikkei Shimbun (which will only print stuff like this if it's damn near a dead cert), Apple has most of the major labels signed up and is planning to launch iTMS Japan in August this year. No surprise about who won't be coming to dinner, though: Sony Music Entertainment has yet to ink a contract, presumably because it runs a (soon-to-be-doomed?) rival service, Mora. Price per song is unsurprisingly going to be higher than $0.99, with the Nikkei reckoning Y150 (about $1.40). However, that still lops a healthy chunk off the Y210 SME is charging for its ATRAC3-only badness.

UPDATE: Or maybe not. Apparently Apple Japan says this story is "completely untrue".

We reported earlier on a hack that enables you to play multiplayer games on the PSP with only one copy of the game. This stirred a deeply (well, not that deeply) buried memory in the hive mind that is Engadget, and we hunted down a Sony ad that's run on Japanese TV recently, which shows popular magician Tomohiro Maeda messing with a couple of PSPs and demonstrating playing a networked game on them with a UMD inserted into only one. The voiceover at the end confirms that there's a feature called Game Sharing that works at least in the game shown, Namco Museum, which is out already in Japan. Unfortunately the title seems to be a run-of-the-mill collection of Namco faves from the past; not like they'd encourage you to buy less copies of anything new, right? (The "Read" link below is to a Windows Media stream of the commercial.)

[UPDATE: OK, seems from the comments like this was old hat to some people. We promise to do penance by ritually beating ourselves with a whip made from UMDs.]

We've no idea who Sakakibara Kikai are, apart from having a vague inkling that they may have the odd screw loose here and there, but they've come up with a two-legged, person-carrying robot vehicle that looks like it'd be ready to audition for a live-action Gundam film at the drop of a hat. Admittedly the Land Walker doesn't so much walk as shimmy its 3.4-metre-tall bulk around the place (looks like there are wheels under those feet), and it tops out at a less-than-threatening 1.5 km/h, but it does have the looks, and even a pair of guns (which fire squishy balls, unfortunately). They also have some video of it, well, sliding around.

Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)

Plastic figurines based on celebrities, historical personages and indeed any teenage talento who are currently in vogue are a staple of the otaku diet in Japan, but as they're created by hand they suffer the same problem anyone who's visited Madame Tussaud's will attest to; namely, they often look only vaguely like the real thing. Japanese company MIC is taking an innovative tack that will no doubt have the purists up in arms, but produces spectacular results; they take a 3D scan of the person to be modeled, clean up the resulting data and overlay a 2D photo on it to get the correct colouring, then laser-cut a figurine and auto-colour the results. Check out the video at the site below to see the results (the page will probably be archived in a day or so, but we'll update the link).

We've come across Tokyo taxis with cellphone chargers before (hell, we've come across taxis here that are fitted with most things), but Kyoto taxi company Ecolo21 are playing up their planet-friendly image by fitting the roof-mounted lights on their fleet with miniature wind-powered generators that you can use to charge your cellphone in the back seat. There are only two minor flaws in their otherwise laudable plan; one, the generator charges directly so you only get juice while the fan on the roof is spinning, and two…they've only fitted out one car so far. They do promise to introduce a version that charges a battery and to fit them to more of the fleet in future, however.

It may only shoot in monochrome at a size of 312 x 260 pixels and take up to 100 frames at a time, but Shimadzu's HyperVision HPV-1 camera can record at a million frames a second (you can step down through a range of slower rates to a crawling 30 fps should you wish), enabling you to capture those precious split seconds of blindingly fast motion in all the loving detail you need.  The rest of the package consists of a Windows-XP powered control unit with a 20GB hard drive and Ethernet/USB2.0 connections; images are stored as either AVI, TIFF or BMP. The whole thing will set you back a stinging Y22 mn ($205,000). We hear the Wachowski brothers will be using this in their next film to capture up close the subtle vibration of Agent Smith's nostril hair as he takes a punch to the head.

[Via Slashdot Japan] [UPDATE: A reader kindly points out the video samples on Shimadzu's site; check out a chunk of concrete being mashed, a water jet, or a water balloon bursting at between 8,000 and 10,000 fps]

Not so much a technotoilet as a whole-room system, Toto and Daiwa House's Intelligence Toilet—no, not a derogatory term for the CIA—combines a loo with a built-in urine analyser, a blood-pressure cuff housed in the counter next to the throne, a set of scales built into the floor in front of the sink, and a body-fat meter above it that you grip after washing. The data gets "provisionally saved in the Intelligence Toilet" before being transferred via a home network to your PC, where it's stored and graphed using a piece of software that'll also use the data to give you dietary advice and so forth. All this will apparently set you back Y380,000-Y560,000 ($3,550-$5,230) on top of the price of a usual toilet ("usual" in Japan meaning "costs $3,000, has warm water, massage and dryer attachments, and maybe even an SD card slot").

We had heard a while back that Motorola would be building smartphones for NTT DoCoMo, and it seems sharper eyes than ours caught the first of these, the FOMA M-1000, making its way through FCC approval a while back. Word is it'll be GSM/GPRS/W-CDMA, have Bluetooth 1.2 and WiFi, include a 1.3 megapixel camera on the back and a 300,000 pixel version on the front for videophoning, and come running Symbian with an Opera browser, MP3 player and doc viewer thrown in.  A look at the draft of the user manual also shows that it supports VPN access, lending weight to the idea that this is going to be mainly for corporate use. Let's hope they do something about the visuals for the production version, though—with Motorola's recent success in regaining some cool on the design front, it'd be a pity to see a grey lump like this hit the shelves.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

This looks like something you wouldn't want to be caught playing with, but gaming peripheral maker Hori has come up with a strap-on (calm down) device they call the periBorg OreCommander which fits over your hand and essentially vibrates the hell out of your fingers when you bend them to a certain angle, enabling you to hit the buttons on your controller with twitching, inhuman ferocity. They also claim it's good for relieving post-game hand stress.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

Sony Ericsson is sticking firmly to their plan to make 2005 the year of musical cellphones with the W31S, a slider that works on Japanese provider KDDI's CDMA 1x WIN network. In addition to the music player and FM radio, you get a 2.01-megapixel camera and a 2.4-inch QVGA display. A nasty reminder of Sony's recent past is in store in the fine print, though; the W31S "supports MP3" in that way that only Sony can—you run your MP3s through SonicStage and turn them into ATRAC3. Guys, this is getting really old now, OK? True to the music theme, it comes in two colours called Remix Orange and Acoustic White, which must be some kind of synesthete in-joke ("Wow, that remix sounds really orange, dude.").

We're not sure what an Attachment Tree is supposed to be (actually, we're not sure where to even start with this one), but the upshot is that Japanese lighting manufacturer Ryoukou has created an artificial, LED-illuminated cherry tree that weighs half a ton and costs $33,500. The whole thing stands six metres tall, with the branches spanning a diameter of five, just to dash the hopes of all you bedsit-dwelling billionaires out there. Power routes up through the artificial trunk and fans out through the branches to a total of 7,600 white LEDs (there's also a version that combines white and pink for the bargain price of $25,400), making for pretty illuminations to sit and get blatted under all year round, in traditional Japanese fashion.

We were convinced we'd seen Rio Japan's Unite 130 MP3 players somewhere before, but it looks like they're actually a new product, if not a great departure from what goes before. You get the standard pack-of-gum form factor, with a four-line organic EL display, a neat slideout USB connector on the back, line in and headphone sockets, and an IR port to allow the Unite to double as a remote; also includes an FM receiver and inbuilt mic and will record from either of these or the line in. Supported formats are MP3/WMA/ASF/WAV/OGG, and comes in sizes from 256MB to 2GB. Prices range from Y15,800 ($150) to Y37,800 ($360); out late March in Japan.

The problem of smoking among Japanese high school students may not be about to bring the country toppling, but it's certainly in the news after a prominent rookie baseball pitcher got himself suspended from school last week for smoking in a pachinko parlour (the gambling wasn't a problem, apparently). Kanematsu Wellness has set out to assist in the good fight with its iki iki Monitor ("iki" means "breath", in case you were wondering), which measures levels of carbon monoxide in your breath to determine whether you're a light, heavy or non-deathstick user. It even comes with a carrying case for portability so kids, watch out for lightning raids next time you sneak off for a smoke behind the bike sheds. One iki iki Monitor will set you back Y65,000 (about $650), or the price of 240.7 packs of Japanese cigarettes.

Of the Japanese cellphone companies, KDDI subsidiary au continues to take the lead with out-of-the-ordinary handset designs. Latest in its au Design Project series is Makoto Saito's oddly-monickered Penck (named for artist A.R. Penck), a rounded-off CDMA 1X WIN handset with 3D speakers, a 1.24-megapixel camera, a 260,000-colour, 2.2-inch, 240x320-dot LCD screen, and support for song downloads, Flash, and movin' pikchas in the SD-video (.ASF) format. It also may just be the first cellphone you could take to a stone-skipping contest and have any kind of chance at winning.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]