Tiny Sony Ultraportable, HD-DVD Laptops, and Here Comes E-Paper

The best from Asia this month also includes new audio players and portable photo printers.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service

TOKYO-- Japan is now counting down the days to summer. The rainy season has started--meaning that summer will kick off in a few weeks with a virtual assurance of blue skies and high temperatures for the next several months.

The World Cup also is in progress and brings up memories here of four years ago when Japan cohosted the tournament with South Korea. In Japanese, you write the letter "W" and then the Chinese character for cup. The second of the two characters also makes up the Japanese word "kanpai," which means "cheers." So cheers to this month's coolest gadgets!

Sony Ultraportable PC

When the new ultramobile PCs were being unveiled at the CeBit technology conference in Germany in March, who'd have guessed that Sony had the neat, little UX50 up its sleeves? The diminutive computer is the smallest VAIO computer yet and runs Windows XP. It's about the size of a paperback book and has a touch-screen display and full keyboard. It looks great, but our early tests reveal the keyboard is pretty difficult to use because there's almost no tactile feedback. Similarly, the 4.5-inch wide-screen display is bright and crisp, but everything's so small that you end up squinting at the display. It's on sale now in Japan and will hit the United States in July. It will cost around $1800.

More High-Def Laptops

Another month, another batch of high-definition laptops. In the last month, Sony has taken the wraps off the first VAIO computer to feature a Blu-ray Disc drive, while Acer has unveiled its first HD DVD laptop. The Sony machine, the VAIO VGN-AR70B, has a 17-inch display and can burn Blu-ray Discs. A single-layer Blu-ray Disc can store 25 gigabytes of data, or about five times that of today's DVDs, and can be used to store both computer files and video.

Acer has gone all-out with its HD DVD laptop. (Note that HD DVD is the high-definition format competing with Blu-ray; see last month's column discussing recent developments.) An addition to the company's Aspire 9800 series, the new machine features an impressive 20.1-inch display--and has an equally impressive weight of almost 17.6 pounds. It will be on sale this month and will cost around $3000.

Sharp Digital Audio Player

Never mind the apparently unshakable lead of the iPod, lots of companies keep coming up with competing players. One of the latest is from Sharp, in two versions: the MP-B200 and the MP-B300. The players have 512MB and 1GB of built-in memory respectively, and this can be expanded with MiniSD cards. Sharp is particularly proud of the thickness of the players, which at a mere 8.9 millimeters (just over one-third of an inch) beats other devices in the same class, the company says. There's an LCD display on the front along with control buttons and a built-in FM transmitter so songs can be heard through an FM radio. It's already on sale in Japan. The B200 costs around $139, and the B300 around $183.

Panasonic SDHC Cards and Camcorders

Panasonic has announced its SDHC memory card and a compatible camera to go with it. If you're not familiar with SDHC, it's an updated version of the SD card format that extends the maximum theoretical storage capacity from 2GB up to 32GB. Panasonic's first SDHC cards out of the gate are 4GB models.

The Panasonic product that will use these cards, the SDR-S200, is a compact digital movie camera with three CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors, and it records directly to MPEG-2. It has a 10X zoom lens and will be available in Japan in early July for around $870. There's no word on overseas sales.

Sony Picture Station Printer

Summer means vacation photos. Sony's Picture Station photo printer connects directly to many cameras, enabling pictures to be printed quickly without the need for a PC. The device accepts PictBridge connections via USB or SD (Secure Digital) or Memory Stick memory cards. In addition to straight prints of pictures, it can tile several photos onto a single picture and has templates for things such as calendars. There are also a number of built-in features like red-eye correction. The DPP-FP55 Picture Station will go on sale in Japan in late June and will cost around $156. It will be available in the United States in July for around $150.

LG's MP3 Player With TV Receiver

In South Korea, a digital terrestrial TV receiver (referred to as DMB locally) seems to be the current must-have feature in many a portable gadget. One of the newest products to get the DMB treatment is an MP3 player from LG Electronics. The FM35 packs a 2.4-inch wide-screen display and supports the MP3, WMA, OGG, AVI, and ASF audio formats. It has 2GB of built-in flash memory. Users can listen to up to 55 hours of music or watch 4 hours of DMB broadcasts on a single charge, according to LG's figures. The device is only for the Korean market.

Sony Disaster Radio

In Japan the threat of a major earthquake is always present, so it pays to be prepared. Stores have entire sections of earthquake-related goods, and soon Sony's ICF-B01 portable radio will likely join the displays. The radio has a large hand crank on the front, so you don't need batteries. Turning the handle for a minute (about 120 turns) will power the radio to receive an AM station for an hour or an FM station for 40 minutes. There is also an LED light that will run for 15 minutes on a minute of cranking and a charger cable for cell phones (users can charge up their cell phone batteries through the radio's hand crank). It's on sale now in Japan and costs around $52. It won't be available outside of Japan.

R&D Corner: Seiko Epson High-Resolution E-Paper

Seiko Epson has developed a prototype electronic-paper display that offers the world's highest resolution, the company says. The 7.1-inch screen that Seiko Epson has developed is approximately the size of an A6 piece of paper (4.1 inches by 5.8 inches) and has a resolution of 1536 pixels by 2048 pixels. E-paper screens are made on sheets of plastic and so are flexible and thin--just like a piece of real paper, hence their name. Developers envisage that e-paper screens could be used as foldable or rollable displays taking the place of traditional newspapers. Because they are digital, the news could be updated in real time or even include video. Don't expect to see the Seiko Epson screen in a product soon, however. Commercialization is several years away, the company says.