Hasta La Gadget!

NTT DoCoMo has Darth Vader selling its Android wares, so what could KDDI au possibly counter with? Why, a force even darker and more heinous than the Sith Daddy himself: Lady Gaga. Yes, the music fiend we love to hate has remixed Poker Face just to make sure we take notice of Sharp’s IS03, and the kindly Japanese carrier has taken care of inserting her into the phone for maximum promotional value. Yes, au, now that we’ve seen Lady Gaga strutting around inside it, we totally want to own one of these handsets! See the video promos after the break.

[Thanks, machine]

Continue reading Lady Gaga trapped in an Android smartphone, we wish she’d stay there (video)

Lady Gaga trapped in an Android smartphone, we wish she’d stay there (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 10:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sharp Electronics today announced that it has been chosen to provide a “countdown clock” from the upcoming 9/11 Memorial and Museum set to open at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2011–the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

The company’s CEO Kozo Takahashi will join the museum’s president Joe Daniels and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg for tomorrow morning’s unveiling at the 9/11 Memorial preview site.

The clock will be embedded into a 13 by seven foot video wall made up of nine Sharp LCDs, which will both count down the time until the memorial opens and feature renderings of what the site will look like finished.

You might have expected Sharp’s pebble-shaped Touch Wood concept to remain just that, a concept, but the eclectic Japanese market has found a spot in its heart to fit 15,000 units of the curvy, wood-trimmed cellphone. Built from locally sourced cypress timber, each handset will have its own unique pattern and color, while the innards will be filled with a five megapixel imager, a 3.4-inch (854 x 480) display, a MicroSDHC expansion slot, and your usual GSM and 3G wireless radios. You can get yours through NTT DoCoMo some time around February or March.

Sharp Touch Wood concept turns real with limited run of 15,000 handsets on NTT DoCoMo originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 05:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that slimmer-than-slim Blu-ray 3D / BDXL player that Sharp demonstrated at CEATEC? Looks like the world now has a ship date and price, though you aren’t likely to be keen on either. The unit itself — which measures but 35mm thick and looks eerily familiar to the slimmed-down PlayStation 2 — will tout a Blu-ray recorder while supporting BD 3D and BDXL playback, and there’s even compatibility with OTA broadcasts for those looking to toast television to blank Blu-ray media. Naturally, a contraption this awesome is going to be reserved for the Japanese market, with reports suggesting that it’ll ship anywhere between mid-December to early January. The real kicker, however, is the price — at ¥85,000 ($1,047 based on today’s exchange rate), we’re surmising that only a handful of individuals can afford to give this thing the time of day. And that, friends, is a modern day travesty.

Sharp’s ultraslim BD-AV70 Blu-ray / BDXL player hitting Japan soon for over a grand originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want to know where the next breakthrough in mobile technology will come from? Well, if Elpida and Sharp have their way, the answer will be the usual suspect of Japan, where they’re working away on new memory chips said to be capable of four orders of magnitude faster performance than the ordinary NAND flash storage of today. Dubbed ReRAM, or Resistive Random Access Memory, this project targets a 2013 date for commercialization and counts the University of Tokyo and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology among its development team. Details on how such blinding speeds will be reached aren’t readily available, but the Nikkei reports power consumption will be down to “virtually zero” when the memory’s not in use. So with ReRAM and HP’s memristors both set for three years from now, can we schedule NAND’s funeral for 2014 or what?

Elpida and Sharp team up for ReRAM in 2013: 10,000x the speed of current NAND flash chips originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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