It’s the third of five days at CEATEC 2008, Asia’s biggest exhibition for consumer electronics (think Asia’s CES), and I must say it’s better than last year.

Here are my impressions of the exhibition:

1)
The level of internationalization at CEATEC stands at an estimated 5%. I am seriously wondering how foreign journalists are able to understand what is actually being showcased. 99% of all text-based information is Japanese-only (brochures, maps, booth displays, etc.).

Most of the staffers at the booths can hardly speak English, which is not really helpful either (I am fortunate to speak Japanese).

2)
The number of real innovations is too low: too many flat screens (yawn), a huge/deserted Blu-ray-only booth (seriously), obvious vaporware, etc. etc. Who cares if a flat screen is now 1.2cm thin instead of 1.3cm?

But this is probably an issue at most tech exhibitions.

3)
Tech powerhouses like Pioneer, Sharp and Hitachi totally disappoint this year. For example, Sony is displaying its 11-inch OLED TV XEL-1 again this year and in almost the same manner as 2007.

4)
Despite of the lack of innovations, Japan shows that it’s still a tech nation to be reckoned with. Some of the tech I saw at CEATEC 2008 is just amazing. Panasonic’s virtual wall for the living room, for example, is fantastic.

I will keep covering the highlights of the event in a series of posts over the next days.

Sony caused a worlwide sensation at last year’s CEATEC by introducing the XEL-1 during the event, its mini OLED TV, which boasts a thickness of just 3 mm (1.4 mm at its thinnest part).

This year, the general public gets to see a OLED display that is just 0.3 mm at its thinnest part (otherwise, the 11-inch screen is technically identical to the XEL-1).

In the US, Sony showcased the ultrathin OLED prototype (under heavier security arrangements) during the D6 conference in May. It was also displayed at the Sony Dealer Convention 2008 [JP], which was held earlier this month in Tokyo.

I had a few days to think over the malaise I felt on attending CEATEC and wandering the streets of Tokyo last week. I had last been to Japan in 2003 and I left feeling that they had their fingers firmly on the pulse of the future. They had cool phones, cool laptops, and MP3 players smaller than grapes. Their cameras were slim and sexy and their prices were oddly low while their tech stores offered a dizzying array of fascinating items for perusal and purchase. As a tech geek, it was paradise.

Now, returning after a week in Chiba/Tokyo, I am sad to report that Japan has lost its mojo. I don’t want to sound like I’m making a blanket statement here — I’m sure, somewhere in Osaka, a Sony researcher is practicing advanced robodildonics on vat-grown cyborg gerbils — but I sense a definite cooling of street tech that, in a way, mirrors our own failings in that same field. We are approximately on parity with Japan right now, and in looking at the things we don’t have we see many failures in the in Japanese neophilia and the danger it presents to our own Western tech culture. Whew. I’m starting to sound like a sociologist.

I was talking with an American ex-pat in Tokyo who described technology in Japan as all-encompassing. He described his home which included drop down shelves that rise and lower at the press of a button and a bath that fills itself and then informs you that your water is ready and waiting. But then, after talking up high tech, he whips out an older Blackberry. It was kind of like watching Zorbo, Boy of the Future whip out a can of spray cheese and offer it as the “food of 2020!”

Again, perhaps I’ve was looking in the wrong places. Maybe Japan’s obsession with brand names and luxury products masks a secret underground robotic Godzilla farm. Maybe their cellphones aren’t just the same damn thing over and over again but actually fake plastic shells — after all, all of them are implanted with bio-chip-powered in-brain PS4s.

Back in the 1980s, France was at the height of technology. They had voice controlled rooms — I distinctly remember some kid’s program, probably some show like 3-2-1 Contact!, showing French people saying “Open Door!” to get out of an R&D lab — and they had MINITEL, a national precursor to the Internet that I wanted so badly I could have tasted it. Where is France now? They make Archos MP3 players and great cheese.

I’m not writing this lament as a jingoist tirade against Japan and its discontents. The country is losing population monthly and has the oldest population on record. The people are comfortable but not as rich as they were in the 1980s and industry, which was once the lifeblood of the Japanese economy, is gone, off-shored to Brazil and China. All they have left is obsessive attention to ’60s-era robot toys and great noodles. I want to say their rising sun is setting, but that would be unfair, cruel, and absolutely wrong.

That said, if you want to see Japan go down the Best Buy. You’ll find everything they have there and more. The things we don’t have — robotic bidets, robotic shelving, and fast 3G wireless networks — are either coming or are incompatible with our building codes and lifestyles. This is also not to say that we are leading the world in high-tech. On the contrary. I could even argue that we are still behind Japan, which is cold comfort considering Korea and China are kicking Japan’s hiney.

What can they/we do to get back on track? Stop obsessing on the quick sell and try to market the future. Apple does this with some regularity. Although their laptop line is hardly revolutionary, their PCs and and phones are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in these devices. Companies like TiVo and Sony, on the other hand, advanced the state-of-the-art a few years ago and now keep churning out the same crap over and over again. Sure, Sony has OLED screens and round bedroom computers, but all they’re marketing are their TVs to an increasingly uninterested audience. Stop making the next crappy MP3 player and try to make something people have never seen before. I know it’s hard and expensive, but it’s the only way to get ahead of the people who can make the next crappy MP3 player more cheaply than you.

And so, to recap, Japan is technologically boring and the street-tech chic of Neuromancer never came to pass. Japan — and, by extension, the U.S. — needs to get back into the game lest in turn into another France, drunk on wine and dressed in Chanel but about as advanced as a stone-age tribe of hunter/shoppers.

I’m going to take this opportunity to say something that has been bothering me all week here at CEATEC: Japan is no longer the home of innovation. Sure, they kicked our asses for years in terms of wireless media, cellphone design, and PC/laptop manufacturing but at this late date I think the iPhone can kick any DoCoMo clamshell and I haven’t seen a single thing here — NOTHING, mind you — that I haven’t seen or heard of in the U.S. already and that would even mildly twiddle my neophilia sensors.


Wonka bars!

Take the Infobar 2, for example. This is a candybar cellphone designed by famous Japanese designer Sum Guy. The phone is about as long as a Zune and has a bunch of buttons on the front and plays mobile TV. It’s shaped like “melted candy” or some crap which is designer code for “I got hungry and drew a Hershey bar.”

Everything I saw here was an incremental improvement over the previous generation of the exact same thing. The Japanese trade show attitude is “pull all the nerds out of R&D, show home wireline communications gear and robots made out of watch parts and hide everything cool at the back where even the young ladies in mid-riff baring futuristic bra ensembles can’t find it.” It really pisses me off that the world of the future is, in reality, about as futuristic as a mall in Columbus, Ohio.

Does this mean that U.S. tech folks can rest on their laurels, a job well done? No, it means we need step things up considerably. If the Infobar 2 is the hottest cellphone release in Japan then these boys are definitely asleep. Come on, Motorola! Come on TiVo! Come on Sonos! Come on everyone who makes cool stuff in the U.S.! Take some risks. It can’t be much worse than this sleek melange of high design and low expectations.

I’m not saying you’re not pretty…

Ever since the U.S. basically outlawed Booth Babes, I think our trade shows have become more serious, intelligent, and valuable. In unenlightened regions like Europa and Japanasia, however, their very presence is an insult to the strides women have made in the realms of commerce, education, medicine, and science and paint this proud people with the brush of misogyny and benighted attitudes about representations of women or, dare I say it, womyn. That said, here are some of the hot and bodacious booth babes of CEATEC 2007 showing their gams to a bunch of gimlet-eyed sararimen who wouldn’t know women’s suffrage if it bit them on the keister.

One thing CEATEC has a surfeit of is robots. They come in all sizes, from a twee bike-riding robot whose visage I cannot now find in my photo library to a set of guard robots that won’t do much guarding when you kick them over before they can alert the authorities. Then there was yesterday’s Sony Rolly, an embarrassment for all involved.

I grabbed photos of all the robots I could find and even interacted with a tentative little guide robot that eventually came back to my room with me and showed me the true meaning of “retractable claw.” It will be a summer wedding. My family will be there and Guardrobo will wear white, although I do believe I installed a third party app into her last night, if you get my drift.

Domo arrig… hey, put down that stick!

One can of Pokari Sweat, please.

NEC’s home robot — so cute, so unassuming, you’d be hard pressed to think it will soon be mining your body for precious bile.

Fujitsu’s Bar Robot — lulls you into a stupor, bashes your face in with a bottle of Old Parr

His mom dress him like this

Fujitsu Turn Table PC fuses Macbook and iPod [NewLaunches]