GW-61

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J@pan Inc Magazine Presents:
G A D G E T W A T C H
The Hottest Gadgets and Gizmos from Japan
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Issue No. 61

Thursday, 13 June 2002
(Long URLs may break across two lines, so copy to your
browser.)

Name: Toshiba PDR-T20
Category: Digital Cameras
Price: Open
Release date in Japan: End of June, 2002

The Gist: Stretching the "make gadgets stylish" mantra about as far as
it'll go, Toshiba has announced its capsule-cute Sora T20.
The T20 is cunningly disguised as a perfume dispenser, you see,
presumably in order to allow its paparazzi owners to get rather
closer to sweaty celebrities on the beach than is healthy or
advisable. It also retains the popular touch-panel TFT of its T10
predecessor and allows users to annotate their pics with
illustrations, captions and so forth by way of a stylus pen,
PDA-style, suspended on what Toshiba describes as a "classy"
neckstrap. We'll see about that.
The diminutive dimensions of the T20 (54 x 108 x 29.5mm) belie its
capacities. There's a two megapixel CCD on board, allowing up to
1600x1200 images, an f5.8-11.6mm lens with 2x optical zoom, an SD
memory card slot and, if you ever feel the need (resist it), it'll
even go up to 4x zoom digitally.
Then there's that tiny 1.5inch, polysilicon TFT LCD panel, eight
selectable shooting modes (night, sports, portraits et cetera), manual
or auto selection for white balance, ISO and program and owners can
even zoom in on and manipulate shots in replay mode or run a
slideshow.
The battery should allow you to take up to 120 shots before they
expire, weighs only 170g and is available in three colors: silver,
champagne gold and pink. Connection to a computer is via USB, but have
the Toshiba boffins seen fit to make it Mac compatible -- unlike my
spanking new e310 Pocket PC? Yes, they have.
More info: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2002_06/pr_j0501.htm

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Name: IBM Thinkpad R31/2
Category: PC
Price: 184,300 yen for R31 base configuration (1.13GHz Celeron, 256MB
of RAM, 20GB HDD, CD-RW drive) and 318,500 yen for base R32 (1.6GHz
Mobile P4 CPU, 1,024MB of RAM, 40GB HDD and combo CD-RW/DVD
drive).
Release date in Japan: July, 2002

The Gist: If you don't like the way some companies tell you what to
have in your new laptop computer, just head on over to your online IBM
store. Trumpeting its new R31 and R32 Thinkpad models, IBM will allow
customers to customize to their hearts' content. While the machines
will also sell in base configurations (1.13GHz Celeron and
14.1inch XGA TFT in the R31 and 1.6GHz Pentium 4 and the same screen
in the R32), you can simply choose the components you like, selecting
between Celeron and P4 for the processor, then pick the amount of
memory, size of hard drive and nature of other drives (CD-RW, DVD-ROM,
etc), OS and whatever else you want.
Take the plunge right now at
http://commerce-26.www.ibm.com/cgi-bin/cpn?q=com1050 with a
reservation and IBM will even throw in a free carry case and/or mini
optical mouse. Bargain.
More info: http://www-6.ibm.com/jp/NewsDB.nsf/2002/06071

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Name: IO Data Memory Card Adapter
Category: PC peripherals
Price: 3,980 yen
Release date in Japan: End of June, 2002

The Gist: Let's imagine, just for a moment, that you haven't fallen
prey to Sony's marketing machine and, despite your coolio Cybershot
digital camera sitting over there on the bookshelf, actually have
several other consumer electronics components in your apartment that
don't, in fact, use Memory Sticks.
How on earth do you get your digisnaps into your non-Sony laptop?
The answer is, you use IO Data's funky new memory card adapter
because, in a stroke of genius, the USB-3ARW can accommodate both SD
and Memory Stick formats - as well as Multimedia cards. Slot 1, on the
top, takes the Memory Sticks and the lower slot 2 either the SD or MMC
cards. The clever little widget should work with both Mac and
Windows-based operating systems, so well done for that IO Data.
More info: http://www.iodata.co.jp/news/200206/098b.htm

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STAFF
Written by: Max Everingham (max@everingham.net)
Edited by: J@pan Inc editors (editors@japaninc.com)

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