Thursday, January 25, 2001

There are three mobile Japanese language general mobile computing magazines I know of in Japan. The two monthly ones (both 680 yen and published on 24th of the month) are 'Nikkei Mobile' and 'Mobile i'. They both contain good, comprehensive information about the latest products on the market, comparisons of different devices and lots of other useful and interesting info. The thrid, Mobile Press, is thicker less glossy and published 4 times a year. It contains longer articles, including ones on interesting looking hardware hacks if that's of interest to anyone. It also comes with a CD with freeware and shareware. All three mags cover all types of mobile computing devices from credit card or watch type up to A4 notebooks. I'll post the URLs at a later date but none of the mags have web sites which feature more than a table of contents for the latest issue. I'll let you know when this changes. I've also seen but not bought a number of Palm publications on the shelves in Japan. I think it's too soon to see a Pocket PC dedicated publication. This will obviously depends on increasing the number of Pocket PC users. With the large number of competing devices available, it's difficult to say when that critical number will be reached. At the moment we have Jordana and Casio models on the market, as well as a device made by Casio but marketed by NTT DoCoMo called the G-FORT. More information on these to come on a related web page at a later date. It's been reported we'll see a Japanese model of the iPAQ later this year ..... I'll believe it when I see it. When they do eventually get it out the technology may already be starting to date. Casio is due to release the E-707 for business users this month which has inbuilt communications functionality as well as Compact Flash and MMC/SD card slots.

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