Smartcards have been out for a while, but smartcard-phones are hard to find… unless you live in Japan where their phones can read from the chip which is already built in, or you can settle with one or two discontinued and old Nokia phones. Some guy in Taipei has tried to dig out the chip from his smartcard (their EasyCard, similar to Oyster in England, Octopus in Hong Kong, and Felica in Japan), and plant it onto the battery cover of his Sharp 903 phone.

Of course your phone would need to have space for that, and you would have to be careful not to damage the circuit when cutting it out. Just imagine the face of the guy at the ticket office. –Sam Chan

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You know how China is a land of freedom in terms of copyright laws, with all those small brands copying Nokia phones and iPhones with the sole consequence of making (good) money. Now how about a big brand copying another big brand, this time being staged in the land of Japan? Jump for more drama.

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Sharp is not a major player in the phone industry outside Japan, but it has definitely attracted a sizable group of cult followers. However the company has not been launching any high-end phones since more than 2 years ago (Sharp 903/ SX833/ WX-T91), well this is about to change this year.

Earlier this month FCC has given go-ahead to a model called SX862 (Hong Kong Smartone-Vodafone indexing) which, from the illustration, looks almost identical to the high-end Softbank 920SH AQUOS phone. The phone should house the same WVGA screen and 3.2MP AF camera. It’ll be running on WCDMA as well as tri-band GSM. There are minor differences between the 2 models including the thickness and battery volume.

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For those who remember the all-awesome Sharp 903 launched years ago, we all miss the sweet 3.2MP CCD camera with 2x optical zoom. Since it was able to be unlocked at that time, we expected all Sharp phones to be unlockable as well… Wrong! Those who had paid $500 for the unusable Sharp 904SH started re-selling them at $250 on ebay because there had been no luck at all in getting the phone to work outside Japan.

Good news is that the Sharp 904SH has finally been unlocked, using a method similar (HyperSIM) to the first iPhones, i.e. your SIM would require some alteration in order to work with the phone. How? Commercial secret.

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Not everybody is happy with the touchpad on laptops. In fact, some would even buy a separate mouse. No matter how compact they are, you’d always need to carry an extra chunk of gear (complete with cables a lot of the time). Wouldn’t it be a great solution to add a detachable mouse to all the laptops? EverGreen Japan seems to have figured it all out with a PCM-CIA slot mouse attachment. Jump to see how it works.

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Bluetooth handsets are getting smaller and smaller nowadays. So small that they are easy to drop, easy to forget. Chinese company Naxing came out with an idea of having a bluetooth handset hidden in your phone. Jump to find out more.

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Apparently SonyEricsson has a new UIQ messenger device soon to be launched, and it would be a P3i under the P series (not the M series). From the thumbnail leaked from MSN China, the P3i might be a variant based on the Elena prototype (viz P1i) that we have seen since the dawn of civilization. Software updates are expected, but unlikely to be groundbreaking. Let’s see how many P1i haters can be convinced. –Sam Chan

For those who are unhappy with the current UIQ user interface employed by SonyEricsson devices, here’s a little something to look forward to. Apparently the UI will have some serious facelift. Here’s a shot snapped from a presentation somewhere, somehow, by somebody. –Sam Chan

We would have been a little more excited if somebody else had leaked their software by mistake and allowed everybody to download for free, nonetheless we are slightly excited to learn that Microsoft Japan mistakenly put Internet Explorer 7 (Japanese version) on Windows Update this afternoon. The above screen cap was taken at 2:57 pm Tokyo time today. Some Japanese users have even managed to install the new browser successfully, keeping in mind that the public release should be in 2008.

The company took the program down and issued an apology afterwards, but we think there’s not much to be sorry about. They even taught people how to uninstall it. Yeah, like we want those extra bugs on your super stable OS. –Sam Chan

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Too much time, too many babies, this is a home-made “Gucci” handsfree device posted on Yahoo Taiwan’s auction site. At least this is more original than the Mokia Notorola phones. 3 cents, why not? Baby not bundled. –Sam Chan

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