Japan’s largest annual IT show, Ceatec (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies), opens today and will feature around 700 companies, according to the organisers.
Last year, the show – the largest international exhibition in Asia for the technology and electronics sectors – attracted 182,000 people with greater numbers anticipated this year.
Naturally, Simon Perry – the Digi-Lifestyles big cheese – is at the show, so you can expect hot news and updates from the floor over the next couple of days.
Running from Tuesday until Saturday at the Makuhari Messe convention centre, Chiba, just outside Tokyo, the show is designed to provide a platform for Japan’s technology vendors to display their latest gear and showcase prototype products.
The anticipated unveiling of rival HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc players could prove to be a show highlight, and there’s great interest in the eagerly awaited new high-definition TVs.
Sharp is expected to show off a hard-disk drive-based digital recorder that is capable of recording two HDTV programs at once, with the machine ready to roll just one second after being switched on.
Toshiba has promised to display a super-slim 12.7 millimetre high drive designed for laptops which can read HD-DVD discs and read and write DVDs and CDs.
Naturally, there’s loads of activity on the mobile phone front, with new products and technology on offer, including portable fuel cells from network operator KDDI.
The company has been working with Hitachi and Toshiba to develop fuel cell-based chargers for cell phones, with the first commercial products expected on sale before the end of March 2006.
As well as shiny new consumer boxes, Ceatec also showcases the products of component makers, with Matsushita showing off a flexible optical circuit board and Seiko Epson displaying a flexible memory chip for use in flat-panel displays.
Born out of a merger between Japan Electronics Show and Com Japan, Ceatec attracted 172,053 visitors in its debut year in 2000, rising to 182,490 visitors last year.
We saw it with the Internet in the late 90s and iTV in the early noughties, now mobile TV is the disruptive technology du jour. 
It’s easy to be swept up in the hype, and persuasive arguments abound. 
Claire Tavernier from Fremantlemedia (right), owner of Neighbours and Baywatch, said “Fremantle TV” would launch on US mobile networks before the end of the year. 
But is the industry is in danger of death by over-sell before it’s even arrived? 
This is all sounding very familiar – we’ve been here before. As with the early days of the Internet and iTV, business models are unclear. Hurdles include lack of appropriate content – including rights clearance on existing properties, lack of spectrum and unproven consumer demand. 
Tavernier also talked about rights, revealing that although Fremantlemedia owned worldwide TV rights to Mr Bean and The Benny Hill Show, both Rowan Atkinson and Benny Hill’s widow had said no to mobile distribution. 
The most telling figures came in the final session of the conference: “Viewers don’t see their mobile as an entertainment device” said Enpocket’s Jeremy Wright (right). “They see it first and foremost as a communicator.”
Motorola have offered more details about their forthcoming 3G RAZR V3x slim flip phone.
The onboard Bluetooth chip supports wireless stereo sound through Motorola’s Bluetooth Stereo headphones and other compatible hands free wotsits, with up to 512 MB of removable optional TransFlash memory.
Motorola have also included an advanced speaker-independent voice recognition which lets users state a number/name and be connected without all that pre-recording palaver.
Meanwhile, as Motorola’s phones scoff the pies, rival NEC has launched the 
We’re still waiting for the official announcement, but Blackberry enthusiast site Pimstack has managed to unearth some photos and specs of the forthcoming Blackberry 8700.
Connectivity is taken care of via quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE connectivity with onboard support for Bluetooth 2.0. There’s also a hands-free speaker phone built in.
RIM Announce Intel Partnership
If you’ve ever spent hours shouting at the little blinking blue light on your laptop screaming, “what do you mean you can’t find my phone? IT’S THERE!!”, then you may find Broadcom’s new BLINK Bluetooth software (Bluetooth-Link = BLINK, getit?) bringing your blood pressure down.
BLINK software claims to soothe the troubled brows of baffled Bluetooth uses with an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) that makes complex Bluetooth-related tasks “as simple as browsing the Internet.”
Once fired up, the BLINK software serves up a graphical representation of the user’s mobile phone on their desktop or notebook PC screens.
“Digital photos, phone numbers and calendar appointments are literally trapped inside users’ cell phones because of the complexity involved in transferring this information to PCs and other devices,” said Brian O’Rourke, Senior Analyst at In-Stat. 
Virgin’s ‘independent-style’ record label, V2 Music has teamed up with mobile video solutions developer Rok Player to announce the release of an ‘indie music video album’ for playing on mobile phones.
Using Rok Player technology, indie kids can play back audio-visual content preloaded on memory cards at an impressive 24 frames a second (full screen) on compatible mobile handsets. 
“This is such an exciting development in the distribution of music videos” enthused Beth Appleton of V2 Music “as nearly everyone has, or will have, a compatible mobile phone and ROK Player turns those into portable DVD players. So now, for the first time, people can watch as well as listen to their favourite artists perform”.
Bruce Renny of ROK , commented, “We’re already seeing tremendous interest in our music video albums for mobile phones, and to be able to include this new title in our portfolio is tremendous. We’re expecting the V2 album to prove very popular indeed because of the high quality of the artists it features”.
To the sound of a thousand wailing Palm Pilots, Palm has unveiled a version of the classic Treo smartphone running on Windows Mobile 5.0.
Palm users still waiting for the Wi-Fi card categorically promised at the 
Carmi Levy, Senior Research Analyst at Info-Tech Research Group commented that the new Treo signals a massive shift in the handheld/smartphone market, adding that “when viewed in conjunction with the sale of PalmSource earlier this month, it’s an acceleration in the demise of the Palm OS platform and final confirmation that its once-dominant position in the broader handheld market is gone for good.
There’s been no release date set for the Windows-based Treo yet, but it is expected to be available “very early” in 2006.
Building on the success of their hugely popular JAM phone, i-mate have announced the new K-JAM smartphone/PDA.
The display comes in the form of a 2.8″ QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) 64k Transflective screen, and the device runs on the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.
The phone offers support for a wide range of music formats, and claims 10 hours running time in PDA mode and 4-5 hours talk time.