Sony Ericsson is sticking firmly to their plan to make 2005 the year of musical cellphones with the W31S, a slider that works on Japanese provider KDDI's CDMA 1x WIN network. In addition to the music player and FM radio, you get a 2.01-megapixel camera and a 2.4-inch QVGA display. A nasty reminder of Sony's recent past is in store in the fine print, though; the W31S "supports MP3" in that way that only Sony can—you run your MP3s through SonicStage and turn them into ATRAC3. Guys, this is getting really old now, OK? True to the music theme, it comes in two colours called Remix Orange and Acoustic White, which must be some kind of synesthete in-joke ("Wow, that remix sounds really orange, dude.").

We're not sure what an Attachment Tree is supposed to be (actually, we're not sure where to even start with this one), but the upshot is that Japanese lighting manufacturer Ryoukou has created an artificial, LED-illuminated cherry tree that weighs half a ton and costs $33,500. The whole thing stands six metres tall, with the branches spanning a diameter of five, just to dash the hopes of all you bedsit-dwelling billionaires out there. Power routes up through the artificial trunk and fans out through the branches to a total of 7,600 white LEDs (there's also a version that combines white and pink for the bargain price of $25,400), making for pretty illuminations to sit and get blatted under all year round, in traditional Japanese fashion.

We were convinced we'd seen Rio Japan's Unite 130 MP3 players somewhere before, but it looks like they're actually a new product, if not a great departure from what goes before. You get the standard pack-of-gum form factor, with a four-line organic EL display, a neat slideout USB connector on the back, line in and headphone sockets, and an IR port to allow the Unite to double as a remote; also includes an FM receiver and inbuilt mic and will record from either of these or the line in. Supported formats are MP3/WMA/ASF/WAV/OGG, and comes in sizes from 256MB to 2GB. Prices range from Y15,800 ($150) to Y37,800 ($360); out late March in Japan.

The problem of smoking among Japanese high school students may not be about to bring the country toppling, but it's certainly in the news after a prominent rookie baseball pitcher got himself suspended from school last week for smoking in a pachinko parlour (the gambling wasn't a problem, apparently). Kanematsu Wellness has set out to assist in the good fight with its iki iki Monitor ("iki" means "breath", in case you were wondering), which measures levels of carbon monoxide in your breath to determine whether you're a light, heavy or non-deathstick user. It even comes with a carrying case for portability so kids, watch out for lightning raids next time you sneak off for a smoke behind the bike sheds. One iki iki Monitor will set you back Y65,000 (about $650), or the price of 240.7 packs of Japanese cigarettes.

Of the Japanese cellphone companies, KDDI subsidiary au continues to take the lead with out-of-the-ordinary handset designs. Latest in its au Design Project series is Makoto Saito's oddly-monickered Penck (named for artist A.R. Penck), a rounded-off CDMA 1X WIN handset with 3D speakers, a 1.24-megapixel camera, a 260,000-colour, 2.2-inch, 240x320-dot LCD screen, and support for song downloads, Flash, and movin' pikchas in the SD-video (.ASF) format. It also may just be the first cellphone you could take to a stone-skipping contest and have any kind of chance at winning.

[Via K-Tai Watch (Japanese)]

The popularity of NTT DoCoMo's 3G FOMA service has been starting to hurt recently—those high-end handsets cost it a lot in subsidies, and with most new subscribers not in the high-roller category, the news for the bottom line is less than rosy. Getting everyone over to 3G while at the same time keeping profits buoyant requires something cheaper and less extravagant on the handset front, so the new 700i series dumbs down the feature set to the "basics": megapixel cameras, videophone, AAC audio playback (plus iTunes sync for some models), and HTML email with support for 500kb file attachments in all models. Yeah, we thought "basic" meant something different too.

Earlier it was a Photoshopped iPod shuffle with a screen, now it's a bunch of Japanese iPod lovers who've been busily grinding the pixels to produce print-out labels that turn your shuffle into anything from a pack of breathmints to a miniature 3G iPod. (Hint: the navigation buttons on the site linked below are at the very bottom of the page.)

We're convinced Japanese carriers drop handsets on us in fours or fives so they can slip in some average models along with the cool ones and avoid ridicule, but anyway: KDDI's latest Japan-only offering is the Sanyo W31SA, a squareish slider phone that records to SD card from either a mike or the inbuilt FM radio, and will play back audio ripped to the card. Unfortunately, they insist on you using a special card reader/writer and some proprietary software to get the audio onto the card, which is a dealbreaker as far as we're concerned. Oh yeah, and KDDI also released some other phones, but they were a bit boring.

DoCoMo's extra-small premini series gains another sibling in the shape of Sony Ericsson's premini II, which though slightly chunkier than its predecessors still manages to come in around business-card size (it measures 105 x 46 x 19.4mm) and includes a 1.23-megapixel camera and MP3 playback from its MemoryStick Duo slot. The only serious slip-up we can see is the decision to make it in brown, though we appreciate that there's only so much black and silver a cellphone design team can take without screaming. Japan-only, before you ask.

iPod-looking things are pretty much pouring from the sky these days, whether they're ripoffs or accessories, but we're fairly sure Sega Toys' idog is the first canine robot to join the party. Looks aside, it does the usual stuff we've come to expect from robot pets, like responding "emotionally" to touches to its various sensors. Its main claim to fame is its musical ability, though: it'll improvise tunes based on 720 internal musical phrases, changing the mood of the music as you wave your hand over the phototransistor on its head (could…get…old…real…fast…). They've even included an external audio jack on its hindquarters for you to connect an external player; no prizes for guessing the device of choice for the MP3 enema at their press event. And yes, it does waggle its ears and paws in time to the music.

One curiosity at Motorola's CES booth that somehow escaped the eyes of our crack reporting team was this prototype system that enables you to spray a pattern onto a wall sensor, which plays a melody in response to the shape that you draw; you can then print out the pattern with a URL that takes you to a ringtone version of the melody that you can download to your cellphone. Next up: Someone at a law-enforcement agency tries to get this automated and applied to normal brick walls so police can catch graffiti artists by matching their ringtones to their tags. Or maybe not.

Wow Wee, who brought us the Robosapien (and its new friends), have unveiled their latest. Speak2Click is a manikin-head interface that allows you to access information on your PC's hard drive by speaking commands at it, and replies using one of 200 responses. Better, though still in the realms of disembodied heads, is the Robotics Alive series; these don't appear to interface to anything, but are scarily realistic animal heads that track you using stereoscopic hearing and have fully-articulated faces. We advise looking at the video for maximum creep-out.

[Via Monkeys in the News via BoingBoing]

Seems that a test-use file looking very much like a firmware updater for the PSP has made its way out onto the Web from the domain playstation.org (which Sony owns). While we wouldn't advise using it to update your PSP, as it contains dummy data that will overwrite your firmware into unusable gibberish, the file's list of contents details the following added functions: a text-speaking app, support for downloading SonicStage-compatible music and news, voice chat software, three game titles, and mail, word processing, web browsing and schedule apps (plus a couple of bug fixes). While this could all be a developer's pipe dream or a total fake, we can but hope. (Check out some video and screenshots of the installer courtesy of Japanese site game.memopad.jp, should you be in that kinda mood.)

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]

Games peripheral maker Nyko Technologies is trying in their own way to make up for Uncle Steve's decision to leave video playback out of the iPod photo's repertoire. The imaginatively named MoviePlayer (at least they managed to avoid sticking a lowercase "i" in there somewhere) consists of a 3.5-inch, 65,000-colour TFT screen and a control pad that hooks up (presumably) to any iPod. No photos or further details yet (like how they get the iPod to play movies), but all will be revealed at CES, along with a remote called the iTop Button Relocator that they'll also be demoing.

[Thanks, gotz]

Update: iPoditude found a pic of this.

If your preference for Mac luggage tends toward the minimal and expensive, Japanese company Shimura's Power Guard series may be just the thing: a metal briefcase-looking shell that clips over your Mac laptop, providing shock protection from above and below and a carry handle. This is strictly fair-weather gear, however—the sides are left open, so you're left with no protection from sideways gusts of rain blowing straight into your FireWire port. The latest in the series, the Metal Jacket Power Guard GU Model, runs from ¥27,000 ($260 US) for the 12-inch iBook model to¥36,500 ($354) for the 17-inch PowerBook G4. (Beware: Shimura's website is Japanese-only and was designed by someone with little or no taste.)

[Via Impress PC Watch]