It's a SONY

SONY held a dealer convention as well as blogger seminar last weekend.

Luckily, I was invited as one of the bloggers :)

They showed us their newest products so I will introduce some of them here:




"sountina" is a speaker, designed as an interior, made of organic glass. Beautiful design as well as sound.


Photos CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki



"ECM-HW1" is a wireless microphone for Handycam video camera.


Photos CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki

Pros: you can get better sounds for your video - you can shoot from a distance, or in a different room, you won't get your own voice in the recording when you interview someone. It's light(as in weight).
Cons: It's big. It's 200USD. (some say it's expensive, some say it's not. But as video cameras become cheaper and cheaper, 200USD for a microphone seems a bit expensive for me.)




NAV-U (car navigation)


Photos CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki

Being able to attach the car navigation to a car with those suckers is one of the features.


Photo CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki

SONY has a team dedicated for this sucker development. He has been doing research on sucker for 3 years already.


Car navigations with GPS loses the location data when it enters tunnels.
Nav-u has acceleration sensor and calculates the speed and direction to keep track of the location even in the tunnels. Acceleration sensor miscalculates the gravity when there are hills etc and the road goes up and down. Therefore it has atmospheric pressure sensor to fix this. It also has Jairo sensor.




Applicast is a widget for televisions that you can use with SONY Bravia TVs.
You can check out information from the internet on the widget while you watch TV. Just like App store for iPhone apps, SONY will make a scheme for individual developers to upload and distribute their own Applicast widgets.


Photo CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki




Life-X is a lifelog sharing service which enables you to aggregate your photos, videos, blog posts, twitter tweets, social bookmarks, and output them to your PC, Bravia(TV), Cell phones, PSP(portable game), and PS3(game).


Photo CC-BY-NC-SA by Fumi Yamazaki

It is sort of like Friendfeed, but one thing is that it is made by SONY and it supports various devices other than PC, also the interface is more catchy in a Japanese sense.

* Remember, Google Japan's simple interface and Yahoo Japan's colorful/contentful interface difference... and Japanese loves Yahoo Japan. According to Comscore,
Yahoo Japan: 46 million monthly unique visitors
Google Japan: 35 million monthly uniques







Other highlights were 9.9mm Bravia television.
9.9mm TV!! Isn't that insane?


Photo by Current


To the "small and thin extreme", they also had 0.3mm organic LED TV and golfball size speaker.

To the "large and powerful extreme", their demonstrations of the beautiful Blu-ray movies and 48:9 3-screen movies were pretty amazing.