Posts Tagged ‘gadgets’

Fake iPhone 5 (Made in China)

A reporter for Nikkan Spa gives us a demonstration of a fake “iPhone 5″ that was purchased in China:

It looks very similar to the legit iPhone 3 and iPhone 4, but it has some quality issues. The touch screen doesn’t respond well to fingers, so it comes with a stylus.

It also supposedly has support for two SIM cards.

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Yokohama Monorail

“Nanikore” finds a hospital in Yokohama that has its own private monorail line:

The monorail was built 16 years ago to provide free transportation to the hospital, which lies on top of a very steep hill. It takes about 3 minutes for the monorail to travel the full length of its 200-meter track. It may seem kind of ridiculous, but because many patients are elderly or too sick to climb the hill, it provides a very useful service.

(At the end of the clip, they say that the monorail isn’t just for hospital patients. If you want, you can go there and ride it just for the enjoyment of experiencing a mini monorail.)

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Jet Hitter Batting Machine

Diginfo shows us the newest generation of the Jet Hitter, a batting machine that makes a baseball float in midair:

“People have used a soft toss batting tee or a batting tee to practice baseball, but since the ball comes at a 45 degree angle when soft toss batting, batters get into the habit of pulling the ball when they bat. Yet they do not get the feeling of really hitting when they use a batting tee. We worked with Meiji University and came up with this idea after we experimented a lot based on the concept, “What if the ball is floating?” This allows a person to practice by themselves, hit at a wide angle, and another major feature is that the ball wobbles a little, so it trains the batter to concentrate, so overall the system has been highly appreciated.”

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Lego Cat Toys

TV Tokyo had some Lego masters build elaborate toys for cats. Here are the results:

Cute kittens + Awesome Lego contraptions = Television gold?

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Texting in North Korea

An Asahi TV reporter visits North Korea and films some surprising things:

The report mostly focuses on luxuries offered to foreign tourists and the technological and economic development of North Korea. We are shown:

• A facial massage that is popular among Chinese tourists.
• A North Korean waitress texting somebody on her mobile phone. In addition to text messages and photos, her phone can send and receive video calls. There are now 530,000 mobile phones being used in North Korea, enough for about 2% of the country’s population.
• Prepaid foreign currency cash cards can be used at some shops in Pyongyang.
• They visit a huge ostrich farm. Ostriches are being raised as a food source, but their egg shells and skin are also used to make products for export. The farm is a big deal in North Korea, and Kim Jong-il even took Chinese leaders on a special tour of it so he could show off the DPRK’s economic prosperity. (During the early days of the farm project, they thought that osriches needed to wear clothing in winter, but now they realize that the birds have no problem with cold weather.)
• At a new luxury hotel built for Chinese tourists, the employees are kind of shy.
• There is a special train that travels between Beijing and Pyongyang four times a week. The journey takes 26 hours. From the window of the train, one can observe propaganda signs praising Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un.

This news report gives us a picture of the comfortable lives enjoyed by North Korea’s small elite, but it doesn’t mention how the situation faced by the rest of the population. The rich are enjoying mobile phones and cash cards in restaurants full of food, but people in the countryside are on the verge of starvation. According to the AFP, the North Korean government has recently cut rice rations for the poor:

“The lowest I heard was 150 grammes per person per day, and I even heard that in Pyongyang the rations are cut to 200 grammes per person per day.”

Diplomats say the rations have been halved over the past 18 months. One hundred grammes of rice produces about 250-350 calories a day, experts said.

Zellweger said she had seen “a lot more malnourished children” on recent travels around the country.
“You see more people out in the fields and on the hillsides digging roots, cutting grass or herbs. So there are signs that there is going to be a crisis.”

Video footage filmed in secret and recently smuggled out of North Korea shows malnourished soldiers and young children caked in filth begging in markets.

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Hugging Yourself With Sense-Roid

You may soon be able to give yourself a hug, thanks to Sense-Roid, a new invention from the same folks who brought us the creepy kiss transmission device:

“There are pressure sensors throughout the whole mannequin-type device, and when they sense an embrace, they activate artificial muscles in the jacket. It can also reproduce the feeling that the wearer is being rubbed on the back. If you rub it on the back then the rear pressure sensors detect it is being rubbed. There is a matrix of vibration motors on the back of the jacket, and the motors in the same position as you are rubbing vibrate, to give a feeling of having your own back rubbed.”

“When people embrace, if their counterpart is a stranger, they probably don’t get much of a good feeling from it. If it is a lover then they likely get a very nice feeling of security and satisfaction. We think that tactile communications like an embrace has a varied effect depending on the relationship with the other party. Thinking along those lines, we wondered what kind of feelings people would have if they could hug themselves, the person they have the closest relationship to, and so we made this.”

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