Hasta La Gadget!

This is certainly an innovative and chic mixture of the new and the old if ever there was one.

Design firm Maruwakaya specialize in stylish consumer goods that collaborate with contemporary brands and traditional crafts. They previously worked with Puma to produce an extraordinary wooden bento box. Now they have created a cover for your iPhone made out of lacquer and deerskin leather (known as “inden” or 印伝/印傳), a technique famous in Yamanashi. As you can see below, this is not only an original choice of materials but the results are very striking too.

What the inden technique does is it makes leather-ware highly durable; ideal for handsets that you take everywhere around with you. The product comes in four different colors and designs. It also comes with a wooden box but, with a price tag between 11 and 12,500 JPY (c.$110-250), this is definitely not a casual purchase. Manufactured in strictly limited numbers and only available online, Maruwakaya is taking orders to be shipped in February at time of writing.

Calling all children of the Eighties! We previously reported on the Space Invaders alarm clocks last year. Now we have the perfect office accessory for you!

Did you love playing the hungry Pac-Man of those early arcade machines? Or were you more a home console kind of person? Well, either way, you can now advertise your childhood nostalgia with these business card holders from Banpresto.

Any Famicom fan will recognize that red-and-cream design — and might just get an itching to get their hands on the real thing. Pac-Man aficionados will love the arcade screen pattern or the detailed motifs on the Namcom character’s card case.

The price tag is just $22 and they come in two versions each — for the fastidious fans — but all imbue a warm sense of the retro! Plus they have two compartments so you can separate your cards from your clients’.

Buy both the Pac-Man and Famicom business card cards from our friends, the Japan Trend Shop.

We love reporting on collaborations on Japan Trends and here’s yet another one — a whole phone created especially for Samantha Thavasa fans called the N-01B.

On release from December, this sleek piece of gadgetry comes in a pink design and is a DoCoMo phone made by NEC. The concept for the campaign is “Handsome Princess” (clearly not a masculine adjective for the Jinglish-loving corporate copywriters). The phone’s camera is meant to bring out beautiful skin and other features include special wallpapers, animations, a heart-shaped speaker and illuminating parts.

Samantha Thavasa is a hugely popular domestic accessories brand (don’t let the western name fool you) aimed at young women that has been hawked by some of the most famous international celebrities, from Paris Hilton to Victoria Beckham to Penelope Cruz.

This mobile release is part of the STNY sub-brand, which also includes leather and canvas bags, and also the “Handsome Princess Necklace”, only available online. Samantha Thavasa previously teamed up with DoCoMo for the STNY Pink Diamond, and this is in fact their third collaboration with NEC.

We previously blogged about DoCoMo fashion tie-ups but this is on a different level. Here a phone maker is collaborating with a fashion brand for a whole product intended for an essentially niche market (fans of this one specific brand, albeit a major one). Given how quiet the Louis Vuitton mobile developments have been of late, Samantha Thavasa is setting an intriguing precedent here with its phones.

Sanyo recently announced a new line of batteries in their Eneloop series of rechargeable batteries called Eneloop Tones. Boasting eight new colors instead of the normal white batteries, the new cells look great in a drawer and on the store shelf, but are a bit harder to appreciate once they’re inside a Kairo hand warmer or any other powered product.

That’s not to say these are totally useless. It’s actually quite nice to see batteries that aren’t trying to look tough and long-lasting, and are more geared towards making digital life more pleasurable, even by just a bit. Since Eneloop batteries are already incredibly popular and known for quality, you can actually feel a bit more at ease opening up a device to recharge dead batteries that still look alive in a way.

Sanyo also announced a new version of Eneloopy, their mascot dog that acts as a gauge for measuring your battery’s charge with a light-up nose.

It’s always good to see lots of color in products, and Japan has been excelling at bringing even the most banal products to life by such small changes.

If you’re anything like me, you just can’t get enough tokoroten. All summer, every day, I’m just fiending for the sweet, sweet product of sea algae. Luckily, Bandai Asovision is adding yet another item to it’s mugen (infinite) series of toys that started with the infamous PuchiPuchi infinite bubblewrap and moved upwards towards infinite beer cans. Now the Mugen Tokoroten let’s you squeeze out the agar-based snack over and over and get some smiley faces in return.

The previous mugen offerings have been incredibly popular, both as a novelty and stress reliever of sorts, but this one’s interesting in that it’s being explicitly targeted at men and women in their 30’s and 40’s. Yes world, cut toy demographics go all over the place.