The kidney-shaped, iPhone-like handset is constructed from a Cypress wood base that’s been compression moulded for extended durability. Despite this manufacturing process, each phone retains a unique grain pattern, colour palate and woody aroma. And, just so you don’t have to feel bad about it, the wood is considered “surplus” from “forest-thinning operations”.

Docomo will be showing off prototypes in Japan later this week. And while we’ll probably never see the phones reach Australia, we can’t get over the fact that wood seems a lot more classy than plastic. [Docomo via Electronista via TFTS]

The porn aficionados, or Jason Chens as they’re known in the States, are causing the Japanese online porn industry to grow at 1,000 new customers a day with some people paying up to $US105 to get on board.

Consider this a peek into the near future here in the US. When more people get phones with data plans that are able to download video, the exact same thing will happen here, just with less mosiacs and cartoons. People love their porn, after all. [Bloomberg via The Register]

The phone, composed of screen half and number-pad half, can be joined along either edge. But DoCoMo calls this phone “separable,” able to be broken apart while staying in contact via Bluetooth, for such activities as:

• Surfing the internet on the screen half while talking on the keypad half

• Watching movies on the screen half while using the keypad as a remote

• Strapping the screen to your wrist as an MP3 player, while leaving the keypad in your pocket or bag

• Sticking the vibrating part down the pants of you or a loved one while… Okay, I admit, I’m making this last one up, but you see how the whole separation thing gets absurd in a hurry, and that’s coming from a guy who thought the phone that has its own detachable Bluetooth earpiece was one of the best products of 2008. Nice find, Charlie. [Wired]

Ippon Zuri, which means pole-and-line fishing, is available to DoCoMo subscribers in the town of Fukuoka, and was created by local system development company FIT, who teamed up with a local fish wholesaler. Gamers pay 1,000¥ (about 10 bucks) for three games, in which they cast to all kinds of seafood, from crab to sea bream in the hope of hooking them.

If successful, the player then has an encounter with a slot machine and, should he get lucky with three matching numbers, then the fish is reeled in, the seafood supplier contacted and, ta-daa, it’s fish for supper. [Pink Tentacle]

Actually, it sounds like the perfect phone for accident-prone technicolor dreamers. It’s waterproof for up to 30 minutes, can withstand jets of water being squirted at it, lose it and, if you press a button on the spanky yellow bracelet, it will bleep if you are within 10 metres of it. If you’re not, the phone will shut down automatically, sending a message to another DoCoMo cell if phone and bracelet are not reunited within five minutes. Available in light blue, orange, black and white, there was a massive, child-friendly launch in Tokyo this morning. [NTT DoCoMo Press Release via Wireless Watch Japan and Akihabara News]

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.
There doesn’t appear to be any kind of a backlight, so you may have to carry your own Itty Bitty Book Light around to see what buttons you are pushing, which sort of defeats the purpose of having hard keys. There doesn’t appear to be a halitosis monitor either, but surely that will come in time. [Nikkei]

So the story goes as follows: Nintendo releases DS. DS becomes instant bestseller. Touchy-screen dual number becomes next game fetish. NTT DoCoMo and Mitsubishi think it may be a good idea, announce DS-like phone. Big N releases Wii; becomes instant bestseller. Wiimote becomes next game fetish device. Same suspects release D904i, a phone that needs to be tilted, shaken, stirred and bashed against any object to play games. The rest of the world looks the other way and pretends nothing happened. The End.

I mean, beyond playing Marble Madness-type games, how in the name of all that is good, sacred or uses a Hylian Shield I am supposed to play a game “swinging the handset like a tennis racket or wield it like sword”? Did anyone think about how to follow the action on screen while shaking it? Unless they are really talking porn, we will probably never know. Or care. – Jesus Diaz

DoCoMo’s new phones offer motion-sensing game play [Reuters]