Just when you thought that the 400GB Blu-ray discs announced in early July couldn’t get any sweeter sounding, Pioneer renders it obsolete less than two months after. The standard size of a Blu-ray disc is 25 GB on a single layer and 50GB with a dual layer. Well, the fat cats at pioneer were not satisfied with even 16 layers of storage. It needed to go bigger. So, they crammed 25 layers on to the disc, with each layer containing 25GB of memory, totaling up to a whopping 500GB of storage space. Even with Buffalo’s 8x Blu-ray recorder, it’d be a difficult task to fill up 500GB.

Brendan Sheridan, Product Manager of Pioneer Europe NV, Multimedia Division: “With its strong support among the gaming, movie and PC industries, Blu-ray has become the de facto next generation storage system. …we envision the need for a technology that can support far greater capacities as HD streaming in particular becomes commonplace and users build larger files of digital content.”

With Blu-ray getting bigger and bigger, you’re going to need a player for all your friends to know how hip you are. What better than a Playstation 3 for all your media needs at a fraction of the price of other Blu-ray players.

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Panasonic has officially started sending out samples of their world thinnest Blu-ray disc drive to computer manufacturers. The 9.5 mm high drive allows for even smaller integration into PCs than was previously available, but is still only being sent on a sample basis.

These drives aren’t only limited to Blu-ray. The new Panasonic drives also offer DVD Super Multi Drive function with 8x writing on DVD-R/+Rs. Panasonic will also be showing off this device at CES 2008 in Las Vegas. — Andrew Dobrow

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Some Japanese dude has decided to play sword with phones, and he’s using the Mitsubishi D903iTV DMB one-button push slider to attack the Panasonic P902i, which also has a one-button push spring mechanism for the folder (Neither of them is cheap). In the GSM world, we can only throw Nokia N95 at people. –Sam Chan

OK, well no company is not quite there in being all green, but some are definitely better than others. Green Peace released their third Guide to Greener Electronics. Apple is by far the worst offender of non-green electronics, with Panasonic and LG tied at second worst. Lenovo leads the pack as the most green of the bunch.

No company is yet to have totally “gone green” and we don’t know if electronic companies ever will. Global warming continues its scare on the global community and many companies have made very valiant efforts at creating a more environmentally-friendly production, but according to Green Peace, we still have a long way to go. — Andrew Dobrow

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We have non-stick glue, non-stick pan, today we have non-stick toilets, thanks to the Japanese material scientists at Matsushita (Panasonic/National). The secret is that they’re using resin-based materials instead of the usual clay. During an interview with Mr Sakai from Matsushita, we learned that their team had spent more than a year to research on resin modification, in order to have it strong enough to withstand the sheer force of having us cough-potatoes sit on top.

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Panasonic Japan has announced today the release of 2 professional IC voice recorders that support for the first time a password security system that prevents unauthorized access to your recordings. Even when transferred to a computer, others will not be able to listen to it unless they have the program, the password or they’re using your computer at first place. Users will be locking the audio file by tying in a password using the jogdial at the side of the voice recorder. The more advaned modle US470 will also support Panasonic’s Zoom Microphone technology that diverts the voice reception towards the direction of the speaker, this works the best when you are sittng at the corner of a lecture all the way at the back, or when you are jumping behind all those tall camera men trying to record the celebrity interview done in the middle of the crowd. The battery can last up to 167hours and 40 minutes on AAA batteries. Price is between $100 and $130 depending on which model you get. — Sam Chan

Press release [Panasonic Japan]

Looks like the latest trend in Japan is to go for shiny phones, Softbank announced 3 more shiny phones this morning, one from each of NEC, Panasonic and Toshiba. All these phones runs on W-CDMA in Japan and GSM triband when being roamed elsewhere. Cameras on 706N and 706P are 2 megapixels whereas the one on 813T is 3.2MP. The rest of the specs are pretty much standard: QVGA screens, microSD slot, bluetooth, music player, HTML browser… so it’ll be up to personal preference to decide between the trio, perhaps the different user interface. They will all be on shelves before March. — Sam Chan

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The good thing about using electric hair trimmers over traditional scissors would be speed, the problem is the edge is usually unnaturally smooth, giving you the Gwen Stefani mushroom-look. So most people, invariably would need a combination of both: a pair of convex-edged scissors as well as the electrical shaver. Matsushita (National branded) has ended this hassle today with their new electric hair trimmer (or personal groomer, as they call it), what it does is that the blade randomly selects the fine threads of hair to cut, and leaving some untouched, simulating how the barber clutch a bit of your hair and cut it with the convex-edged scissors. The trimmer is also waterproof, so you can flush it under the tap. There’s also a style-guide that comes with the kit, should you pick it up in Japan in March, for $80. — Sam Chan

Matsushita National ER5209 hair groomer [Impress]

Just 4 hours after AU KDDI’s announcement, NTT DoCoMo announced the new WCDMA 703i series in Tokyo. Nothing out of our expectation as we wrote about before. Also announced are the SonyEricsson BRAVIA SO903iTV DMB phone and Mitsubishi’s double-internal screen D900iDS, both of which Gearfuse premiered on Sunday. The 703i series is the mid-low end of DoCoMo’s 3G portfolio, so don’t compare their specifications with that of the W5 series from AU KDDI. Take note that all these phones will only be available in Japan and Japan only, they will not be unlockable, and neither will other versions be released outside Japan as they are co-developed between NTT DoCoMo and the manufacturers. We have pictures and details of all these cool looking phones after the jump.

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Japan’s second largest operator AU KDDI announced 10 new EV-DO phones this morning for the Spring 2007 line-up. Including the W51SH which we showed you the picture way before announcement. To our surprise, the Pantech W51PT which was also leaked earlier has not been announced yet. The 10 phones include one from the AU Design Project- the Media Skin, 2 from Toshiba, and 1 from all Casio, Panasonic, Hitachi, Kyocera, Sanyo, SonyEricsson and Sharp. Out of these 10 phones, 6 of them will support the DMB One-Seg service. Take note that these phones are jointly developed beteen AU KDDI and the manufacturers, they will not be sold outside Japan and neither will they be unlockable. More details on each of these phones after the jump.

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