Lifestyle & Travel Tech & Science
Faith Aquino on Jun 14 2013
The
International Tokyo Toy Show is currently having an exhibit on various toys that as young as 4-year olds and adults will enjoy. Participating companies have developed
toys reminiscent of those available when this generation’s adults were still young. There are also companies that directly target the little ones, still with parental participation.
The 1990s generation must have been ecstatic when
Bandai announced that they're bringing Tamagotchi back in the market, this time as an application in Android and iPhone. It was a worldwide phenomenon when the virtual pet was first released in the form of an egg-shaped key chain. No wonder Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. has also become a hit to Android and iPhone users. Bandai Co. and Sync Beatz Entertainment reported Wednesday that the application reached 1.5 million downloads in iTunes on March 28 with more than 1 million downloads from Android users. The 2.5 million downloads were
reached within 90 days since the release of Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. app.
Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency ordered
KDDI Corp., one of the country's top mobile carriers and operator of the "au" phone service, to desist from using its exaggerated advertising campaign that grossly over-estimated the coverage area of its Long Term Evolution (LTE) high-speed network for Apple’s
iPhone 5, a unit they recently added to their phone catalog.
It may not come out in public confirming so, but almost everyone in the display industry knows that Japan Display is one of
Apple’s biggest suppliers for the liquid crystal displays (LCD) on its flagship products. Japan Display has recently announced the expansion of a manufacturing facility in Chiba Prefecture, an area east of Tokyo, to spur overseas demand for panels for smartphones and tablet computers, banking on the yen’s weakness to better its profit margins.
Yes, we believe that the time has truly come to start sniffing our
smartphones – and Japanese gadget company ChatPerf is taking advantage of all of us who want smell our mobile phones with this new phone accessory called "Scentee." The mobile phone add-on is basically a liquid container that emits a perfumed scent that is activated by the accompanying app installed on your smartphone. Hot or not?
Sharp Corp., Japan’s leading manufacturer of liquid crystal displays (LCD), is aiming to strengthen business ties with Korea’s mobile phone making giant Samsung Electronics Co. expanding the latter’s supply of small LCD panels. Sharp is planning these overtures towards the Korean company while still providing small LCD panels to
Samsung’s top rival Apple Inc. Anonymous sources have revealed that this plan will be made public as Sharp looks set to announce its latest earnings today, putting forward a goal to increase annual operating profits to 153 billion yen (1.5 billion US dollars) by March 2016.
Tech & Science
Ida Torres on May 8 2013
Reports from some media outlets say that
Sharp is set to start manufacturing the
iPhone 5S LCD panels by June in its Kameyama Plant No. 1. It also says that Apple has sent orders to Japan Display and LG Display and the mass production for the latest iPhone model is already in full swing.
For decades, the Japanese cellular phone market was an impregnable fortress protecting local handset manufacturers – even for global the smartphone phenomenon that was Apple’s
iPhone. And why would it not be? Japan’s handsets were so advanced in features that the Japanese smartphone users were already watching TV, navigating with GPS, downloading music, making movies, paying bills, and checking their emails years before the Americans were. Japan had a touchscreen phone eight years earlier than iPhone. But in 2012, that peak was finally assailed and conquered by Cupertino’s trendy iPhone –
Apple’s all-conquering phone finally went top of the pile in Japan.
Thinking of writing the next great Pulitzer prize-winning novel? There's an app for that! The
Yaritori Book Store app for iPhone can collect your emails with your friends, turn it into a book, and you can even have it printed and bound like a real tome.
Japan Display Inc. is widely known to be one of two Japanese suppliers for screens of Apple’s flagship
iPhone. But the market hasn’t been so kind to the Cupertino-based gadget giant, and sales of the latest iteration of the iPhone is well below expectations. To counteract the lack of orders, Japan Display is targeting to boost its sales by as much as 60 percent, all from smaller makers of tablet and phone devices.
