Items tagged with Japan
Many Americans feel like the state of broadband Internet service in the United States isn't that great. In addittion, in many areas there is only one broadband Internet provider, leaving consumers with no choice but to pay exorbitant fees to carriers like Comcast, Verizon and a select few others. While much of America struggles with broadband speeds that are slow compared to the rest of the world, Japan now will be offering blazing-fast speeds at what we'd consider here in the US to be a reasonable price. In Japan, NTT East and NTT West (Nippon Telegraph And Telephone) have increased data speeds for their existing plans up to 10 Gbps (that's 10 Gigabits per second or 10,000 Mbps bandwidth). In...
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Japanese Apple fans will soon be able to get the iPhone XR at a discounted price; new NTT DOCOMO customers will be able to save roughly $100 over the life of their plan. The price reduction is part of Apple’s rumored plan to cut back on 2018 iPhone model production. Previously, the iPhone XR 64GB with a 24-month contract would have cost NTT DOCOMO customers ¥36,000 JPY (over $315 USD). Now the device will ring in at ¥24,000 (roughly $211), not including mandatory contract fees. Many new NTT DOCOMO customers will be able to snag an entire iPhone XR 64GB contract package for ¥7000 yen ($62) per month. NTT DOCOMO is one of the biggest mobile carriers in Japan and its serves more...
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If you're into extremely rare Japanese video games, we may have a real treat for you courtesy of a unveiled stash. A folder full of roughly 70 ROMs (weighing in a 67GB in size) was uploaded to a private forum earlier this year, but eventually made its way into the public domain. It should be noted that the games in this collection have been circulated by avid gamers in secret for quite some time. However, one of the game collectors that had access to the titles decided to go rogue and posted a video of Labyrinthe: Horror Tour 3 to YouTube. At that point, any remnant of secrecy was now gone. "A reader sent me the collection earlier this year, and we agreed to wait a long period of time to share...
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When you think of Sony, you would probably think about the PlayStation 4 game console and digital cameras first and foremost (and if you're a bit older, maybe the Walkman). Sony is very diversified, and a report is making the rounds that claims Sony is set to launch a ride-hailing service in Japan. Sony announced its plans along with partnerships that it has forged with several taxi firms in Japan. image via wiiii Sony will work with Daiwa Motor Transportation Corporation and five other taxi firms. The goal is to launch the new ride-hailing company this spring. The six taxi firms that are working with Sony have 10,000 vehicles combined and provide services mainly in Tokyo. Sony plans to...
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Whether here or abroad, the Nintendo Switch is the hottest selling console around. With regards to the latter, Nintendo has unloaded no less than 1.5 million Switch game systems in its home country of Japan since the console's release in March. To put that into perspective, the Switch is significantly outpacing the PlayStation 4's debut, which took more than twice as long to record 1.5 million sales.Nintendo achieved the feat with its Switch console in just 26 weeks. Its remarkable debut was bolstered by 86,000 console sales for the week ending August 27, which was helped in part by console bundles for Monster Hunter XX and Splatoon 2. That represents and whopping 268 percent week-over-week increase...
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Whether your ability to speak Japanese is rusty at best or you never learned the language in the first place, do not let that stop you from planning a visit to Japan. Just be sure to bring along a smartphone with Google Translate installed. Google's nifty translation tool just received an update that allows the app's augmented reality (AR) Word Lens feature to recognize the Japanese language and provide on-the-fly translations using your phone's built-in camera.This is one of the wonderful benefits of AR that goes beyond gaming. As Google points out in its blog post announcing the feature upgrade, Tokyo can be a confusing and even daunting place to navigate if you don't speak Japanese."Even if...
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The supercomputer race has only just begun. Japan is currently planning to build the world’s fastest supercomputer. The machine, nicknamed AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), would ideally be able to process 130 quadrillion calculations per second or 130 petaflops. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for scientists, companies, and bureaucrats to work together in order to dominate robotics, renewable energy, and other up and coming industries. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the supercomputer project and should commence in early 2017. IBM's supercomputer WatsonJapan is particularly interested in artificial intelligence such...
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Fictional creatures with mystical super powers are roaming the streets of Tokyo! No, we're not talking about another Godzilla movie, but the inevitable infiltration of Pokemon Go into Japan, the newest territory to be swept up in the most popular mobile game of all time. Heck, Pokemon Go might be the most popular mobile app of any kind at this point.Whatever the case might be, Pokemon Go is finally available in its home territory where it's finding an eager audience. Why the wait? Niantic explains that the reception to Pokemon Go in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia was much greater than it anticipated, so it wanted to take some time before rolling it out in Japan.Indeed, Pokemon...
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Microsoft made quite the impression at this year's E3. The company unveiled a fancy (and expensive) new Xbox One controller that you can customize to your liking, and even more appealing, Microsoft announced that it's adding native support for hundreds of Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One. Even so, gamers in Japan were largely underwhelmed by it all, as they collectively purchased just 100 Xbox One consoles two weeks ago. That's not a typo, folks. Media Create, a Japanese-language website that tracks video game software and hardware sales in Japan, pegged the Xbox One's sales at just 100 units from June 8 to June 14, 2015. For a country with a population of 120 million people,...
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Chocolate and peanut butter, football and cheerleaders...light bulbs and wireless stereo speakers? Sony today is announcing the May 23 release in Japan of its LSPX-100E26J, a LED light bulb through which audio can be played. The company's press release pegs the new product as being a part of their "Life Space UX" product group, showcasing devices that "take advantage of space itself to create a new experience, aiming to do so by fusion of light and sound" (roughly translated from the Japanese). "How many _______ does it take to screw in a music-spewing light bulb?" In an installation example that is certain to get audiophile fingers a-tinglin' and toes a-tappin' (salivation...
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Samsung's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge — the very essence of HOT hardware in the smartphone space today — will go on sale in Japan this Thursday (April 23) without the company's logo on the devices, and will instead sport the monikers 'Docomo Galaxy' and 'au Galaxy', named after their Japanese telecom carriers. Samsung made the decision to white-label their raging new entries into the smartphone space amid persistent rumors that the company was planning to entirely pull its smartphone business out of Japan. The company has had a difficult time trying to establish any kind of a foothold in the Land of the Rising Sun, and with only a sliver of the Japan's smartphone market share...
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Your fancy pants smartphone might be able to play games like Angry Birds and stream movies from Netflix, but in Japan, it's just another overpriced device with a shrinking audience. Taking their place are those clamshell phones that your pop still uses. It seems crazy, but flip-phone shipments in Japan went up in 2014 for the first time in seven years.Citing data from MM Research Institute Ltd, Reuters says that smartphone shipments fell a full 5.3 percent to 27.7 million units, down for a second year in a row. Meanwhile, flip-phone shipments rose by almost the same percentage -- 5.7 percent to 10.58 million units.Image Source: Flickr (Shahbano Khushi)These aren't exactly the same phones you've...
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Sony is on fire with its PlayStation 4 console blazing a trail in the next generation console wars. Having racked up 5.3 million PS4 sales up through February 8, 2014, Sony already surpassed its goal of selling 5 million units by the end of March, and that was before launching in Japan. Having now unleashed the PS4 in Japan earlier this week, Sony can add another several hundred-thousand unit sales to its tally. According to Famitsu, a Japanese language gaming magazine and website, Sony sold 322,083 PS4 consoles in Japan during its first two days of availability. To put that figure into perspective, it's nearly four times as many PlayStation 3 console sales during its launch in 2006. The PS4...
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There’s no denying that in today’s world, data is king, and the Internet is his queen. (Or perhaps vice versa.) In the U.S., there’s been much talk about gigabit (1Gbps) Internet speeds for the masses thanks in large part to the efforts of Google and its Google Fiber projects, but the EU--where average Internet speeds are around 19.7Mbps--has its sights set on a much higher goal. The EU and Japan are collaborating on six research projects, that, among other goals, would ostensibly result in the build out of 100Gbps networks. Other challenges the projects will address include cyber security, network capacity, storage, high-density data traffic, and energy efficiency. European...
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The latest in the Bond film series, "Skyfall," was certainly one to remember. And not all of those memories were pleasant. The head villain's island lair was a particularly spooky place, and sure enough, it's roots are grown from a real place. The decaying wasteland depicted in the film was a shadow of Hashima off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture in Japan. Due to its unique flat shape, the island is most widely known in Japan by its nickname Gunkanjima — aka “Battleship Island.” In some circles, it's called "Dead Island." According to Google: "Starting in the late 19th century, Hashima served as a coal mining facility and residential complex for 5,000 people. After the decline...
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Prices for Apple iPads and iPods have shot up sharply in Japan amid desperate attempts by the country’s financial leadership to stop deflation. According to Reuters, Japan’s economy is struggling as the yen has fallen 20% against the U.S. dollar in a matter of months. While the Bank of Japan is promising to pump billions into the economy to try and achieve a small inflation rate, several foreign companies companies have raised prices on their goods to make up for the falling exchange rate. The 64GB iPad is now at 69,800 yen compared to 58,800 yen just days ago (about $691/$583), and the 128GB version is up to 79,800 yen from 66,800 yen ($791/$662). Prices for iPad minis and some iPods...
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Microsoft is expanding its Surface Pro offerings by releasing a 256GB Surface Pro in Japan on June 7th. That’s a fairly impressive amount of storage capacity, and coupled with the fact that the Surface Pro runs Windows 8 Pro (and with the Type Cover as an accessory), the device sounds a lot more like a super-thin notebook than a tablet. The rest of the specs sound attractive, too; there’s an Intel Core i5 chip inside with Intel HD 4000 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a pen input device included. Office Home & Business 2013 is included (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook), as well. The 256GB Surface Pro is certainly priced like a notebook; it’ll reportedly run buyers...
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Japan’s NEC has created a smartphone that actually uses liquid cooling, which is a development that is either awesome or stupid, and we’re not decided as to which it is yet. In any case, the NEC Medias X N-06E smartphone indeed has a water-filled heatpipe that pulls heat away from the device’s processor, apparently dispelling the heat through the phone’s polycarbonate exterior; there’s also a graphene sheet on the motherboard, providing a nice additional heat buffer. The NEC Medias X 06E also features a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro (1.7GHz) chip, 13.1 MP camera, and a 4.7-inch 720p OLED display. With those specs, it’s hard to say if liquid cooling is really...
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Watching films in 3D is what you might call “neat” (if you can stomach the nausea and endure the headaches), but a theater in Nagoya, Japan has a 4DX theater that takes the immersive theater-going experience several steps further by incorporating fourth dimension effects such as strobe lights, seats that jostle and vibrate, fog and “lightning”, and even smells, all of which are designed to sync with the film you’re watching and enhance the overall experience. The first film to get the 4DX treatment at the theater will be Iron Man 3. “It was really a matter of timing that Iron Man became the first title for 4DX in Japan,” company spokesman Tagiki Ishiguro...
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We're pretty sure the executives at RIM, er, BlackBerry, have nothing personal against Japan. It's a fine country, and we're pretty sure the top brass there have given it a visit in recent years. But that said, Japanese citizens patiently awaiting BlackBerry 10 are going to have to swallow some bad news this week. Despite shipping in the company's native Canada, and promises to hit the U.S. market in a few months, BB10 won't ever make it onto Japanese shelves. Here's the quote being given out by the company's spokespeople: "We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets and we are seeing positive demand for the BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched....
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When machine finally decides to rise against man, the human race is going to have its hands full. For one, it's a well known fact that robots have super human strength and pose a particular problem for senior citizens (we're not making this up, but Old Glory Insurance might be). They're also cheaters, so don't go hoping for a fair fight. Maybe not all robots are cheaters, but the one built and programmed by researchers at Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Japan is certainly a scoundrel. It only has three fingers, but it will beat any five-fingered human opponent at Rock, Paper, Scissors every time. You could play against it 100 times and it would lay paper over your rock, cut your paper with scissors,...
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Looks like there will be one less player in the semiconductor market meant to shape up 4G LTE chips. With LTE becoming more and more important from a global perspective, companies that craft LTE radio chips will undoubtedly make loads of money if they can land deals with phone OEMs. But it sounds like one that was destined to work at the end of last year won't even make it to the market. NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese cellular provider, has announced that it has terminated an agreement concerning the establishment of a joint venture company to develop and sell semiconductor products for mobile devices, which the company signed with Fujitsu Limited, Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited, NEC Corporation, Panasonic...
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