Toshiba’s W56 is the new OLED phone for AU. It’s sleek and thin exterior with a splash of color (orange in this case) makes for a very chic phone aimed at the younger masses. Specs for this phone is as follows:

With a 2.8″ OLED screen (QVGA) which can rotate 360°, our phone supports both the 1Seg TV (Digital TV) and Digital Radio, supports LISMO (A service like iTUNES from AU), supports multitasking, has a 3.2Mpix AF camera, GPS module, PC Site web browser, Bluetooth, EZ Felica (electronic wallet), and a storage capacity of 800Mb; this in only 145g and 50×106x17.8mm.

There are also three colors to choose from.

Akihabara.

We announced it about a month ago: the Vodafone V501T keitai by Toshiba can disguise itself into several “textures” and patterns. The word “kigurumi” is Japanese for “costume”. As in, wearing a rabbit suit for example. For Vodafone, cute animals were not enough: they went rubber tire, cheese, soda…

This week end, they started advertising the “Kigurumi Keitai” V501T in Shibuya station, where all the hip youngsters have to pass through at least once a week. And they also made a special flash-heavy website that I can’t manage to get into (perhaps because I’m on Mac).

Haven’t seen these keitai in shops yet, but they should be there soon enough.

KDDI has announced that the upcommiong W32SA by Sanyo, and the W31T by Toshiba will be equipped with their new EZ feature “EZ Memory Pocket”.

Basically, this allows the user to upload their entire address book including phone numbers and details to an AU server, where it is backed up incase of handset loss or malfunction. We all know how frustrating it can be when you lose your phonebook!

According to TechJapan, the menu can be accessed by going “Top Menu” > “Search by EZ Service” > “EZ Memory Pocket”.

EZ-MP’s service will begin at 105 Yen per month. That’s about USD $1.

In the image above, you’ll see the process of uploading. The little sun is saying “Uploaded photos and movies can be shown to everyone! Albums can be created thru Memo Pocket Site, and accessed through PC aswell!”

This certainly will be a handy feature of the EZ handsets, and I’m sure DoCoMo and Vodafone will include something similar but with an “i” or “live!” attatched to it ^^.

Official EZ-MP Website: EZ-MP.jp
Via: TechJapan

When Vodafone acquired J-Phone a few years ago, they inherited a not too comfortable market: kids. au/KDDI is supposed to be the operator for the young cool adults, NTT DoCoMo covers Everyone in general, and with the Foma high end stuff they reach the rich young adults as well as the geeks, tu-ka (KDDI) is after the older people who don’t care about digital cameras or java games, and J-Phone/Vodafone is supposedly the phone for the kid who likes to show off with silly games, gadgets, useless accessories, but doesn’t have as much money to buy high end stuff as the au or the Foma crowd. This is a generalization of course, but it becomes obvious when you watch the ads and the features of the phones.

Vodafone spent who knows how much for their big tv/billboards campaigns featuring David Beckham and Nakata Hidetoshi (probably the most famous soccer player in Japan), and they forgot that they were by far not the leader in Japan, and that their consumer base needs cool stuff ALL THE TIME. If they asked me, I would have explained that to them, but they didn’t. Instead, they kept releasing one phone every now and then (6 months or so) when au and DoCoMo were introducing lots and lots of new cool features and loads of new phones all the time, stealing away their customers, one at a time. Well, they should have asked me but hey…

All this to say Vodafone is finally waking up it seems. They haven’t released any new revolutionary thing technologically speaking, but the creatives there have finally started thinking of original ideas that might make young and bored people buy Vodafone. I say it’s about time we see things like this one, dressed like a little red devil! They have just announced the V501T (Toshiba), which comes in a choice of 12 “costumes” (Polygon, Soda, Tile, Bull, Tire, Cheese, Sucker(!), Lawn, Gummi, Wave, Mermaid, and Dinosaur Egg).

Now, who cares about the specs when your phone looks like that? If you really need them, I suggest you read the press release.

They also introduced the Vodafone V501SH (Sharp) which can also be customized with “texture panels”, which are supposed to change the tactile feel of the phone itself. Not as cool but a noticeable effort to follow the success wave of Foma’s P901i covers that are ubiquitous and have been for a while now. Below is the type of displays you find all over the place in Tokyo. One would have expected that Vodafone come up with it first, as it is pretty common in a Nokia world, but quite unusual in Japan, but again DoCoMo did it first. Let’s see how this one goes.

Via Gizmodo

Daimaou sums it up very well, and until I go to a shop and see them, I won’t go into further details about the 5 new 3G WIN models introduced this week by au (KDDI). As he says, “of course they all have their own specs, but overall what matters is:
-Tuner TV
-Tuner FM
-3.2 megapixel camera
-Bluetooth (for some)
-Document Viewer (PDF, Word, Excel… for some)
-Web browser (real one. for some)”

(If you want to know more details about the specs and all, please say so in the comments below.)

Via Akihabara News

Another music playing keitai on au’s WIN is the W21T by Toshiba. If you don’t like “breeze green” and “sunrise yellow”, you’ll be happy to know that it also comes in “lightning silver”, just in case. But what sets it apart from the crowd is its graphic engine that allows to play 3D games and watch TV too. The usual stereo, GPS etc.

Main specs:
* weight: 126 gram
* size: 50*99*26 mm (clamshell)
* main display: 2.4 inch (1.1 inch subdisplay)
* main mobile camera: 1.3 megapixel CMOS
* data storage capacity: 23 MB
* memory card: miniSD 256 MB
* Bluetooth