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TOKYO EDGE - May's coolest gadgets

By Martyn Williams , IDG News Service , 05/07/2008

If the new products we've seen in the last few weeks are anything to go by, we're in for a great year gadget-wise.

In the portable world we've got the first Centrino Atom-based computer and a smartphone from Sharp that will go on sale in Japan. Sanyo's new model of its waterproof Xacti digital still camera has even clearer video and includes the ability to follow your friends' faces underwater! A lot more bulky but equally exciting is NEC's Lui PC. It combines a PC and digital video recorder and makes the entire system accessible over a home network or Internet so you can log into the base PC and access recorded programs or the PC desktop.

And from the research and development labs comes an interesting chip from Seiko Epson that enables e-paper to enter a whole new world: the chip can support a touchscreen, and means that it's now possible to make e-paper than can be written on -- digitally, of course. And finally, just as Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV blew people away with its thinness, the company has done it again with a pair of prototype OLED display panels that are just a few tenths of a millimeter thick. They could mean ever thinner TVs in the future -- definitely something worth staying tuned for.

NEC Lui PC and home media server

NEC has launched a new PC and home media server called "Lui." The Lui can tune into digital high-definition TV broadcasts, and stream both live and recorded programs to compatible TVs and computers. It also allows remote Windows desktop access from portable devices. It's akin to a digital video recorder and PC packed together into a single, large case and is intended to sit in the living room next to a television as a central server for multimedia content. The top-end model has a Blu-ray Disc drive and 1T byte of hard-disk storage for video built alongside a fully-fledged computer running Windows Vista Premium and based on a 2GHz Core2Duo processor and with its own 320G-byte hard disk drive. For this NEC is asking users to pay ¥379,800 (US$3,753). The two thin clients dedicated to accessing the Lui are also available. One model looks like a small laptop PC and has a 10.6-inch screen while a second looks more like an Ultra Mobile PC and comes with a 4.1-inch screen. The former will go on sale for ¥89,880 and the latter for ¥49,980. Their use is dependant on a network connection and link back to the home Lui server. NEC has no plans to sell the Lui PC overseas.

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