October's coolest gadgets

October began, as it always does, with Japan's biggest electronics show: Ceatec. The show attracted a little over 196,000 visitors who got a chance to see the best of the Japanese electronics industry, including some exciting new prototypes of devices that are still some way from hitting the market.

One of the biggest draws was Murata Manufacturing's unicycling robot, but robots from Nissan also made headlines. There were lots of thin TVs too, but it seems like I've spent so much time looking at ever-slimmer TVs recently I'm going to leave those out of this month's column! Something interesting was the Au Box, a sort-of set-top box that brings together broadband content and funnels it to a cell phone or TV.

Away from Ceatec there were a couple of interesting digital still cameras to add to those I brought you last month plus, causing some excitement among gamers, a renewal of the best-selling DS Lite from Nintendo. Would you believe people began auctioning reservation tickets for the DSi, as the new model is called, fewer than 24 hours after its announcement? That's about a month before it goes on sale.

Murata's Seiko unicycling robot

Murata Seiko-chan robot

Murata has improved on its Murata Boy bicycling robot by coming up with a model that can unicycle. Inside the robot's body are two gyroscopes. One helps keep the robot from falling sideways and the second does the same job with forwards and backwards movement. An ultrasonic sensor helps the robot maintain a distance from objects in its path and a Bluetooth module handles communications. It's also fitted with a camera that sends live video. Like Murata Boy, Seiko was developed by the company as a platform to show off the company's components and isn't destined to become a product.

A computer with a prototype add-in video card based on Toshiba's SpursEngine chip on display at the Ceatec exhibition in Japan.

Spurs Engine video cards

The first add-in video cards for PCs based on Toshiba's SpursEngine video chip are out this month. The SpursEngine is based on the same Cell processor architecture as the chip used in the PlayStation 3 console and is designed to process HD (high-definition) video. Leadtek and Thomson both have cards coming to market. Leadtek's card will arrive later this month, and will cost around ¥30,000 (US$286). Thomson's cards will arrive in November, and are expected to cost from ¥40,000 to ¥50,000. SpursEngine is capable of encoding or decoding HD video thanks to hardware MPEG2 and H.264 codecs and can upscale standard-definition video to HD on the fly, without tying up the computer's microprocessor.

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