Why is this man lounging in a rowboat with Darth Vader? Because apparently when you buy a Galaxy S on Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, you get the power of an evil intergalactic wizard along with it. Or something like that. More »
Aside from a name that clearly doesn’t mean in Japanese what it does in English, Docomo’s Touch Wood phones deserve a bit of attention. More »
Apparently, Japanese carriers KDDI and DoCoMo are being totally overwhelmed by porn downloaders on their 3G networks. I don’t know what they expected to happen when porn services started offering movies for wireless download. More »
Charlie at Wired’s Gadget Lab finds NTT DoCoMo’s two-piece magnetic phone entertaining, but to me, the reasons it’s supposed to be useful range from frivolous to baffling to just plain dumb.
The NTT DoCoMo prototype phone shown in the video above has an embedded DLP projector, presumably using an LED light source in order to project a respectable 20- to 25-in. video image on the wall a few feet away. The downside, as you can hear from the dude asking questions (AOL Switched’s Tom Samiljan if I’m not mistaken) is that the phone is large, or at least small but strapped to a real brick of a projector. I guess we’re supposed to admire the image, and wait for the actual mini-projector technology to catch up. [TechPertPanel - YouTube]
A new fishing game for mobile phone users based in western Japan is mixing the virtual with the actual, as competitors who hook a fish get the chance to have the same kind of fish delivered to their door by a local seafood wholesaler.
DoCoMo, purveyor of multi-coloured phones to Pantone fans in Japan has come up with a 3G phone aimed at kids. As well as having many safety features and a keyboard designed for small fingers, the F801i, which goes on sale in Japan December 20, comes with a bright yellow “amulet.” Not to ward off evil phone spirits, but as a remote control and lost phone locator you wear round the wrist. See it, and a gallery with more info, below. More »
Remember that “e-ink” phone we showed you yesterday? We just got the details and better pics. It’s a DoCoMo prototype hard-keypad phone that actually uses e-paper from SiPix, not e-ink, to change the meaning of the keys.
E-paper works slightly differently than Sony Reader’s e-ink, which has black and white balls of opposite charges, floating in a clear liquid, which change position when polarity changes. Here, the particles are just white, and are suspended in a coloured liquid, floating up when needed. Engineers have come up with five e-paper colors—blue, red, green, yellow and black—and the prototype plastic bodies are meant to correspond with those colors. It takes about one second for the display character to change. More »
