Items tagged with Japan
Japan this week passed amended legislation that could land a person in jail for up to a year for posting online insults. Prior to now, those who ran afoul of the law could be put behind bars for up to 30 days and fined 10,000 yen (around $75 in US currency). The fine has been increased as well, to 300,00 yen (around...
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For the longest time, Skittles’ slogan has been “Taste the Rainbow,” but have you ever considered actually doing that while it is plastered across your screen? Japanese professor Homei Miyashita has, evidently, and has created a prototype lickable TV screen that can mimic the flavor of various foods. While this...
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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
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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
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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...
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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"...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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