Hasta La Gadget!

It was exactly a year ago that news began to surface of Fujitsu’s intention to come to Europe with its Android-based smartphones. Now the Japanese company is finally coming good on those reports: on Tuesday, Fujitsu is launching its first device in Europe, marking its first “extensive foray into the smartphone market outside Japan.”

But it’s not the company’s high-end Arrow Android phones that will be leading the charge. Instead, it is the Stylistic S-01, a senior-focused, Android 4.0 device with big icons, enhanced audio and a de-sensitized touchscreen aimed at elderly users. The device will sell first in France, starting in June and in partnership with France Telecom/Orange. The first devices will be shown at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona next week.

While targeting elderly users first may seem like a strange tactic for a smartphone market debut, it actually makes sense for a number of reasons.

According to WPP’s Kantar Worldpanel, there are already countries in Europe where smartphone penetration has passed the 50 percent mark (the UK is 61 percent). France is not quite one of them yet, but it is close at 46 percent.

That means that in a world where Samsung and Apple are dominating smartphone sales, competition is getting tight to sell to mass market, younger demographics and some more specific targeting is needed.

Smartphone penetration among seniors in France is only around 20 percent, but some 75 percent of mobile users in the senior age bracket plan to buy a smartphone in the next year, according to one survey. France Telecom tells me that it has more phones in the pipeline for seniors. “We’d like to see what the appetite for this device is but we recognise the senior user segment as a new market for us to target, so we will be considering other devices for these users in the future,” a spokesperson says.

Indeed, Orange is also bucking the ageist trend that assumes smartphone technology is only for young people. “The senior customers within our customer base are just as hungry for smartphone technology and mobile internet services as anyone else,” noted Yves Maitre, SVP of device and mobile multimedia, France Telecom-Orange.

Fujitsu says that it has sold some 20 million phones in its Raku-Raku senior phone line since its launch in 2001 in Japan, where it is sold exclusively by NTT Docomo. Fujitsu’s only other foray outside of Japan has been for a trial of smartphones in China.

The Stylistic S-01 has several features that make it more friendly to the older user. Among them, the homepage icons that appear on the four-inch screen have been simplified and cast in a larger typeface to make them easier to see. The touchscreen, meanwhile, has been made less sensitive, with users required to push extra hard, as they would on a keypad, in order to tap through a command or number. While this might be annoying to the average smartphone user, Fujitsu says this reduces the amount of accidental touches that an older person might make on the device.

Other features include a personal security alarm and audio technology that slows down fast talkers, and adjusts the frequency of voice callers relative to a person’s age, and water resistance.

A France Telecom spokesperson says that for now there are no plans announced for further country rollouts, nor has it specified how it will be priced.  It will depend on what Orange France decides to roll into the tariff and what services it ultimately bundles with the device.

But it looks like Fujitsu, at least, has plans for this to be the first stage in a wider international plan.

“As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange – a company that holds a strong position in the European market – will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” said Nobuo Otani, Corporate SVP, Fujitsu Limited, in a statement. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.”

Full release with more device specs below.

Fujitsu and Orange Partner to Deliver Smartphones to the Rapidly Growing Senior Market in Europe

Intuitive, feature-rich STYLISTIC S01 smartphone to debut June 2013 in France

Tokyo and Paris, February 19, 2013 – Fujitsu Limited and France Telecom-Orange today announced a new partnership to offer mobile phones and services in Europe. The partnership marks Fujitsu’s first extensive foray into the smartphone market outside Japan. The initial offering will be the STYLISTIC S01, a smartphone designed especially for senior users, and will be available through Orange in France in June 2013.

As the senior population in Europe continues to grow rapidly, smartphone usage in this demographic is expected to rise. With the release of the STYLISTIC S01, Fujitsu and Orange plan on offering users in this market segment an innovative smartphone that provides outstanding usability. The STYLISTIC S01 will include services like Orange Cineday (*1) and Orange et Moi (*2), which are unique to Orange. Based around the human-centric technologies that Fujitsu has cultivated for over a decade, the STYLISTIC S01 also offers a variety of original, convenient functions designed to reduce barriers to smartphone adoption by maximizing ease of use.

One of these barriers is conventional touchscreens, which do not offer the tactile sensation of pressing a physical button. The STYLISTIC S01, however, employs a unique screen technology that requires users to apply the same level of pressure to on-screen icons as they would to buttons on a keypad. This helps users avoid inadvertent touches, preventing unintended operations and improving input accuracy. Furthermore, the intuitive graphic user interface features extra-large icons and a simplified layout to ensure straightforward navigation for easier operation. The STYLISTIC S01 is also equipped with a loud personal security alarm that can be used to alert people in the surrounding area in emergency situations.

The handset incorporates audio technology that optimizes the frequency range based on a user’s age, making it easier to hear the voice of the person on the other end of the call. Another user-friendly audio function slows down the speech of callers who speak rapidly without lowering the pitch of their voice or changing the length of the conversation. These and other innovative features are currently in use in the Fujitsu Raku-Raku Phone series for seniors, which has been offered by NTT DOCOMO since 2001 in Japan where it has sold over 20 million units.

“The senior customers within our customer base are just as hungry for smartphone technology and mobile internet services as anyone else. We are thrilled to be working together with Fujitsu to leverage our combined strengths to provide products for an emerging smartphone market segment in Europe,” said Yves Maitre, Senior Vice President of Device & Mobile Multimedia, France Telecom-Orange.

“As Fujitsu’s first extensive entry into the smartphone market outside Japan, we are delighted that Orange – a company that holds a strong position in the European market – will be offering our phone, which features Fujitsu-exclusive human-centric technologies,” said Nobuo Otani, Corporate Senior Vice President, Fujitsu Limited. “We are committed to the success of this partnership as we strive to expand our smartphone business overseas, while advancing the promotion of Japanese technology worldwide.”

The STYLISTIC S01 will be on display at the Fujitsu stand (Hall 5 Stand 5E120) and can also be viewed upon request at the Orange stand (Hall 5 Stand 5H110) during Mobile World Congress 2013, to be held in Barcelona, Spain starting February 25, 2013.

STYLISTIC S01 Product Specifications

· 130 x 64 x 10.9 mm
· 4-inch WVGA (800×480) touchscreen with unique tactile feedback technology
· Camera: back 8.1 MP; front: 0.3 MP
· Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSPA, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, GPS
· Memory: 4 GB + microSD
· OS version: Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0
· Chipset: Qualcomm MSM8255 1.4 GHz
· Battery: 1800 mAh
· Water- and dust-resistant (IPX5/8, IP5X)

Glossary and Notes
1. Orange Cineday
Allows Orange customers to take a friend to see a movie every Tuesday for free.

2. Orange et Moi
A free application enabling Orange customers to understand and manage all their account details directly from their mobile in an efficient and easy manner. Customers can track their consumption, top up their account, take out options, find out about special offers, access Orange help, and also discover all the applications published by Orange with just one click.

If you’re a hard-core gamer, the name Turtle Beach most certainly means something to you. We met with the tournament-grade headset maker to discuss their new Seven series of headsets, originally debuted at CES.

There are three different models in the line, the XP Seven (meant for all consoles, PC, and mobile), the Z Seven (meant for PC and mobile) and the M Seven (mobile only). Both the XP Seven and the Z Seven come with a special Audio Control Unit (or ACU) that lets you adjust even the most minute details of the audio.

For example, you can set the speakers to be loudest toward the rear, letting you catch on to anyone who might be sneaking up behind you. You can also adjust the headset so that footsteps and gunshots can be louder, while the actual game sounds are much lower. There are eight different pre-set configurations you can build on your own, making it quick and easy to switch from one game to the next and still enjoy the best possible audio for each.

Users also have the ability to mix in music from their phone, answer calls, and chat with other players using the XP Seven. You can even remove the microphone and just use these bad boys as your main headphones. Plus, the plates on the ear cups are removable, so you can buy various colors to customize your headset.

At $279, the XP Seven is on the expensive side, but with the extra advantages they bring it’s well worth it if you game every day.

The Z Seven model has all the same functionality, but is meant for PC and mobile only, while the M Seven doesn’t come with an ACU but does bring console-quality sound to mobile gaming.

All three models are available now, so click here if you’re interested in learning more.

We all go through phases where we feel like we’ve seen every possible Kickstarter project that we’d ever want. And then one like Mycestro comes along and reminds us that this is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a 3D mouse that you strap to one of your fingers and it looks like it could become a huge asset for multi-tasking.

If you think about how you use your computer, be it a desktop or laptop, you know that your hands move from the keyboard to the trackpad or mouse constantly, over and over again. It’s wasted movement for the most part, especially when you see the possibilities that Mycestro unlocks. The only thing left is for it to get funded, because it looks like all of the prototypes work perfectly.

Its founder and creator, Nick Mastandrea, has been tinkering on this project for quite a while, having been featured in Engadget a few years ago, but it looks like it’s ready for primetime. You’ll be able to pick one up for a $79 pledge in white, or $99 with your choice of color. The estimated shipping date is sometime in October of this year, if all goes well.

Have a look at some of its features, which include touch buttons that allow you to navigate your computer without the need for moving your entire hand to a dedicated area on a computer, thanks to 3D technology and space recognition:

Here are the specs for the 3D Mouse:

– Size of a wireless earpiece.
– Light, weighing next to nothing.
– Internal battery can be charged via USB.
– Battery life is estimated to be eight hours depending on usage.
– Two different replaceable clip sizes.

This isn’t a completely perfect situation though, as you’ll have to re-learn how to use a mouse. The other thing is that if you’re in a coffee shop or somewhere in public, people are going to look at you like you have some issues. The thing is called the Mycestro for a reason; it looks like you’re conducting your own private orchestra. In other words, you’re going to look weird. If you’re okay with that, then the benefits outweigh the public shame and looks you might receive.

The device works from 30 feet away from your computer, thanks to Bluetooth, so you could use this for presentations at work. The touch technology it has reminds me of Google’s Project Glass, which allows you to tap a panel on the side of the wearable device to make things happen, like a mouse or trackpad. The other plus is that it’ll work with any iPad or iPhone, with Android support coming by the end of the year. This could be a nice way to have a lean-back experience with a tablet, or do the driving while someone else holds it.

Check out this demo using it with an Internet-enabled TV:

It reminds me of the Xbox Kinect a little bit, but it’s in your hand and requires no setup.

With 38 days left to go on its Kickstarter campaign, Nick Mastandrea and his team has raised $39,735 out of $100,000. I think if people can look past the Mycestro as a curious oddity and understand how this could make them more efficient on the computer, this thing will get funded, and then some. The team says that a version for lefties will come a bit after the original model. Personally, I use the trackpad and mouse with my right hand, even though I’m a lefty.

So who cares if people think you’re making hand gestures into thin air to nobody in particular. Aren’t people who use Bluetooth headsets already weird? Exactly.

Rumors from an “extremely reliable source” speaking to 9t05Google have suggested Google will start to operate its own physical retail stores starting as soon as the 2013 holiday season in the U.S. Brick-and-mortar shops from an Internet search company? Sounds like a stretch, but the Goog is breaking out of its search box big time, and recent additions to the Nexus line are proving it has a real chance at establishing a direct relationship with customers.

Google has had a difficult time keeping its Nexus 4 smartphone, manufactured by partner LG, in stock, with the device being mostly unavailable through Google’s Play store until just recently. But the company’s efforts to sell direct weren’t an overnight success; it attempted to sell hardware direct with the Nexus One back in 2010, but stopped selling after a few months, since very few customers opted to buy the device at its full, unsubsidized price online.

But if Google does one thing well, it’s iterating on less-than-stellar product launches and building on a firm foundation of failure. And that’s exactly what it has done with Nexus; the tablets it starting selling the via its online hardware store did major one thing better than the Nexus One, by offering no-strings-attached hardware at a bargain basement price. Hardware sales, Google seems to have learned, won’t work if customers are asked to eat a cost hit in exchange for freedom. They needed both, and weren’t willing to trade economy for freedom.

Now Google has the recipe right for online sales, and it appears to have worked very well for the Nexus 4, and at least moderately well for Nexus tablets. But Google is still missing a key ingredient that has helped the iPad gain enormous consumer traction, and this latest rumor indicates it’s listening to the words of its biggest rival about how to possibly finally come up with a significant breakthrough for Android tablet market share.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has made no secret about Apple retail’s impact on iPad sales. Most recently, he essentially attributed the iPad’s worldwide success to Apple’s physical stores, and the opportunity they provided to make believers out of customers who might otherwise not necessarily have understood Apple’s tablet as a product category. As Ingrid noted in her recent piece covering Cook’s comments on retail at a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week:

“One of the things that’s not understood that well about the stores is that I don’t think we would have been nearly as successful in the iPad as an example if it weren’t for our stores,” said Cook. He noted that people’s view of the tablet, prior to the iPad, “ingrained in their minds [was] a heavy thing that no one wanted.”

Google needs a tablet to achieve the same kind of thing with an Android tablet, or at least to come close. Making an “experience”-baed retail store akin to what Apple’s offering doesn’t guarantee consumers warm up to Android tablets, but it’s a risk that’s likely worth taking, given that Google has had positive indicators for its online retail efforts of late, and that Apple seems to place a lot of the credit for the iPad’s success squarely on the Apple Store’s shoulders.

Nexus tablets need a home run, and that hasn’t come in the form of hardware so far, despite modest gains by gadgets like the Nexus series and the Kindle Fire. But maybe that’s because a device isn’t the answer they’re looking for: customer outreach is.

Last May, Incident Tech launched the gTar, a guitar with real strings that connected to a smartphone for some amazing sound processing. In the last few months, the founder, Idan Beck and his team have been busy preparing the 800 guitars he pre-sold on Kickstarter for shipment. Theirs is a story of creativity, cool, and the next generation in music technology. I spoke with Idan briefly about his Disrupt experience and how it felt to go from zero to shipping in less than a year.

TC: So how have things been going since Disrupt?

Idan: Things have been extremely busy and going well! Shortly after disrupt we shifted our primary focus on getting the gTar into mass production out in China. While we had already been going out there for nearly a year at that point, we spent the next 6 months hammering out every issue imaginable in production and learning about how much goes into making a thousand of something.

Now we’re starting to get units out of China in batches and fulfill them out to our amazingly supportive and patient Kickstarter backers. As a result of the last 6 months the product has really improved as well, with the end result and build quality far exceeding our expectations, since as a result of production we had to make certain changes to the design and architecture of the product, allowing us to make some significant improvements to the technology, along with the direct ability to upgrade the product in the future through iPhone delivered updates as well as hardware upgrades that our customers can install themselves.

TC: Tell us about the gTar before and after Disrupt. What did you think would happen before you got on stage?

Idan: Before Disrupt the gTar was still a relatively secret project being worked on in a closet-sized office in the flatland of Santa Clara. Before that I had originally started building the product in my garage in Cupertino and after that we were bouncing around for a while (even working for a month or so on an Icelandic ferry docked in the SF bay), but once we knew we were going to Disrupt everything sort of got official. Driven by the pressure to get things right, our team pulled together a really professional looking video and presentation in a matter of weeks while gearing up for what we felt was going to be a make it or break it point for the product.

TC: Were you scared? Excited? How does it feel to launch on stage?

Idan: It’s definitely exciting and almost foreboding to get up on the stage, especially considering that you have such a short amount of time and it’s not really possible to leave much to chance. You’re somehow stuffing three years of work into such a short little moment, and hope that people understand implicitly what had to go on under the hood to make all of that happen.

It definitely has this sort of epic feel to it and we were definitely nervous as all hell. We spent every waking moment practicing and rehearsing every word and sentence we were going to say. Also, our dependence on our early stage prototype hardware was always something we were worried about. For example, the night before our presentation, Josh had to run out to get a Dremel tool that he somehow managed to find at the only open hardware store in Manhattan, so that I could make some internal tweaks for us to re-route some wires through the prototype to avoid any potential battery issues or audio problems that might pop up on stage.

That prototype is in a case now, and we’re planning to hang it up as a piece of art. It was very much a super early prototype (and the only fully functional gTar in existence at that point) and we easily had disassembled and reassembled it at least 10-20 times over those few days. In fact, we did it so much that we were ruining the screws holding on the pick guard and by the last day we only had 3 left!

TC: How many did you pre-sell that day?

Idan: We launched the project around 2PM or something and we hit our $100K Kickstarter goal in just over 11 hours so by the end of the day we had pre-sold north of 200 gTars. The project ended up raising over $350k with about 850 people pledging to get a gTar.

TC: Why didn’t you play any really smoking hot-reggae jams on stage? Like “Stir It Up?”

To be honest I think we could have chosen a better set of songs for our demos, but we were also playing it a little safe as well since we wanted to choose a song that I could play well enough knowing that I’d probably freeze up on stage. I think you can probably see my leg shaking if you look carefully enough in the video of the first presentation. We actually got a lot of feedback on that demo, so for the second presentation we did change up the songs around, which definitely was a good move.

TC: What’s next for gTar? Another version?

Idan: We’re still working hard to get a gTar into the hands of everyone that backed us on Kickstarter, and are making solid progress and getting some great positive initial feedback. We’re eagerly awaiting another large shipment that’s on its way and on the ocean as we speak. We’ll be putting some serious effort into an Android dock and app, as well as Web browser based compatibility. We have done some light conceptualizations of how other instruments would work within our platform, but are mainly focused on the gTar for the moment.

We’re working hard to continuously make the gTar a better product, and as a result of some the design changes that went into effect during production, the units we are sending out today will also have the capability to benefit from those improvements as we roll them out. This includes continued improvement to our own app, such as a deeper exploration and development of the social aspects of the product.

A few weeks ago we launched an online store that is already generating pre-orders for the spring, and we’re developing retail distribution channels for the summer and holiday seasons. We’re also looking to expand our team over the next year as well!

TC: If Disrupt were an EBay account, what would you write in the review?

Idan: I would think that the comparison is much more likened to a summer fling. It’s a short, intense, and immensely rewarding experience that ends up surprisingly thrilling for everyone involved. At the end you might not end up being number one, but the experience will change you for the better.