May's coolest gadgets

May 7, 2007 —

May begins each year in Japan with Golden Week. A week-long holiday for most people thanks to four public holidays, three of which are bunched together. It's a great chance to relax or get out of the city and the first big holiday of the year after the new year break. For many companies the weeks before and after the holidays also mark the start of the build-up to the summer sales season.

It's the first decent chance we get to see some of the upcoming new products, like NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s motion-sensitive cell phones. Digital video, both consumer-generated and recorded from the TV, continues to be a big theme and something that many of Japan's consumer electronics companies are now pushing heavily in the hope it will be embraced by consumers.

NTT DoCoMo Motion Sensitive Cell Phone

Mix the Nintendo Wii and a cell phone and what do you get? Something like NTT DoCoMo's new line of motion-sensitive cell phones. In a boxing game users can throw punches or duck, and their movements are picked up by the phone's camera. In another game, the phone can be tilted in different directions to guide an on-screen ball through a maze. To be sure, the cell phones aren't nearly as reactive as the Wii console. You need to make a motion, such as a punch, then wait a second for the punch to get registered on the phone screen, but it's a start! The handsets come from Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Panasonic and Sharp Corp. and will be available in Japan only in May or June. Prices vary with incentives.

Sony Memory Stick camcorder

Meet the HDR-CX7, Sony Corp.'s smallest high-definition camcorder to date. The camera, which is due to go on sale in the U.S. in June, records 1080i high-definition video directly to a MemoryStick Pro Duo card. Until now its camcorders have relied on MiniDV tape, DVD discs or hard-disk drives to store video, but the memory card slot and associated electronic take up less space and mean a smaller, lighter camera. But it doesn't come without disadvantages. Memory cards are quite expensive, and users will be able to store only about 30 minutes of video on a 4G-byte card in the camera's highest quality mode. Behind the lens is a 3-megapixel image sensor, and the camera can also capture 6-megapixel still images, Sony said. Other features include a 10x optical zoom lens and a 2.7-inch wide-screen, touch-sensitive LCD (liquid crystal display) monitor. The CX7 weighs 450 grams and measures 69 millimeters by 67mm by 129mm. It will cost about US$1,200.

Sharp HDTV Recorder

As consumers continue to snap-up high-definition TVs, Sharp continues to push out HD capable hard-disk recorders. The latest, the DV-AVC52, combines a DVD drive and VHS deck with a 250G-byte hard-disk recorder. The machine will copy your old VHS tapes onto DVD so you can finally dump another relic of the 20th century and you'll also be able to get up to 31 hours of HDTV on the disks. But like almost all hard-disk recorders it remains stuck there. Pretty much the only way to store HD content is on Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD but since this doesn't have either you'll have to keep it on the disk -- and thus lose some recording space -- or transfer it to DVD at standard definition and lose the high-definition picture. It will only be available in Japan.

Toshiba expandable HDD recorder TV set

Toshiba Corp.'s latest series of flat-screen LCD (liquid crystal displays) televisions goes one better than other hard-disk video recorders by offering the user room to expand the storage space. Typically you're stuck with the drive that ships with the TV (or recorder) but the H3000 series sets sport an eSATA (external serial ATA) connector on the back for plugging in an external disk drive. The sets ship with an internal 300G-byte drive and the expansion socket should work with any eSATA drive. They are available now in sizes from 32-inches to 52-inches. The 32-inch model is available for around

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