This robot from Sanyo is designed to maneuver under your floor. Bypassing any obstacles in its way, enabling users to remotely inspect the leakage of their home’s piping, corrosion and deterioration of structures.

The robot is operated via remote control, taking photos of the pipes in question, displaying the image to your pipe expert. This means that half of a very labor intensive job is done for you, without the hazard of some guy crawling under your floor boards, or the need of ripping up your floor just to find that there’s no problem at all. — Andrew Dobrow

Link

Sanyo Japan was showcasing their new line of washing machines, AQUA this morning. The one that catches the most attention would be the ability of dry cleaning clothes at home. You heard that right, the wet-washing machine is able to dry-clean your clothes too, and they’re using Ozone. Sanyo was able to lower the temperature down to 50C, making leather jackets (and shoes) or silk ties fit to be tumbled in those washing drums.

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When it comes to SD (SDHC) card camcorders, few would deny that the Sanyo Xacti line is indeed one of the most popular products if not the best and most successful in the market. Digital camera giant Canon is planning to take Sanyo down with their new PowerShot TX1, equipped with a similar 7MP CCD sensor and the ability to record HD videos up to 1280×720pixels 30fps. What’s more is that Canon fitted in an optical anti-shake lens with 10x optical zoom, their DIGIC III image processing engine, other proprietary technologies such as face-recognition autofocus. The TX1 is also a lot smaller than the Xacti, measuring 29.0×59.9×88.8mm and weighing 220g. Sanyo must be very worried when Canon quoted the suggested retail price of 500USD (a whooping 300USD less than the Sanyo Xacti HD-2), you would lose the HDMI output and the ability of taking still pictures in the middle of video recording, but who cares, you can do a lot with the 300 bucks you save; besides, we have more faith in Canon optics. We have a picture of the TX1 flipped open after the jump.

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You know there are always moments that you want to capture with good-enough digital photo, especially in the middle of movie recording? And those screenshots off the moving pictures are never good enough, even when we have HD recording nowadays. Well, Sanyo’s Xacti line of pocketable digital camcorders might just come into the right place, because these camcorders can take great digital prints in the middle of movie recording. The company has updated their flagship model this morning with a CCD of 7.1 Megapixels effective, low light performance was also improved so that the camcorder can work in environments as dim as 7 Lux (down from 14 Lux on the previous model), ISO can go up to 1600. Also, 8GB SDHC cards are now officially supported, this is good for 3 hours of HD-SHQ movies at 1280×720 pixels 9Mbps, or 21 hours of VCD quality movies. The Xacti houses a lens with 10x optical zoom (38-380mm f3.5). Digital anti-handshake during movie recording and HDMI/D4 output are both in place. The improved battery life allows you to take movies non-stop for 85 minutes or 180 photos straight. With all that power, the DMX-HD2 still keeps the compactness of the Xacti line, measuring 80×36x119mm and weighing 235g. The DMX-HD2 will be on shelves by March and will sell for a very reasonable 800USD, keep in mind that this is also the world’s smallest and lightest High Density camcorder. — Sam Chan

Press release [Sanyo Japan]

The folks at Sanyo are Snoopy fanboys, they’re no shy about combining the name of their rechargeable battery Eneloop with that. So we have the Eneloopy today, a dog that takes the Eneloop battery in its tummy, the nose will light up when there’s juice in there. Then you can roughly guess how much is left from the brightness. As if that’s not the main function, there’re also a couple of plastic bones that come with the Eneloopy to make it look cute. (ah, that’s the whole point) The Eneloopy is not for sale, but only distributed to 5000 of its very special customers. Let’s see if people would kill for these dogs. — Sam Chan

Eneloopy [Impress]

For those that live in places where the climate does not allow you to live without an air-conditioner, you will understand how annoying it is to clean the filters inside. We all aim to clean it at least once a year, but sometimes it is up till the point when we can’t stand the smell any more do we take turns to do the cleaning. Sanyo’s new Seasonal Color air-conditioner EX series have a few gadgets in their to save your trouble. There is UV that kills the germs, there’s Ozone that reacts with whatever that gives out smell, there’s also a CO2 and air quality sensor in there that once activated can suck out the air indoors and replace it with filtered clean ait from the outside. With that, we probably would have never needed to wash our air-conditioners for the rest of our lives. These machines will come out in March, selling at $2.3K in Japan. — Sam Chan

Sanyo EX series [Sanyo Japan]

One of the models that deserve attention in the Winter line-up of AU KDDI would be Sanyo’s W42SA. This phone supports a new kind of handwriting recognition that does not require a stylus, instead you would be using your thumb to “stroke” over the number keys. Of course you can still use the usual T9 predictive text system, but just face it, there are a lot of words that even the Japanese don’t know how to pronounce properly, names and places with difficult Kanji for example (Chinese characters); and when you don’t know how to pronounce them, there’s no way you can type using Kana or romanization.

Of course this function is not needed if you use a fully alphabet-based language, but apart from being able to recognize thumbwriting, the Smooth-touch keypad (literally) can also be used for scrolling, similar but not as smooth as the Multi-Touch on iPhone obviously. The NikkeiBP team finds the Smooth-touch works pretty well, the built in 2 megapixel autofocus camera worked reasonably given that the overall thickness is only 19.4mm (49×99x19.4mm 117g), the smooth hinge design and huge buttons are also praised.

The 2.4″ QVGA screen, full HTML browser, music player and GPS all do their job as promised. The only nudge here is that Sanyo has not been maximizing their technology as you cannot use the Smooth-touch pad to control the cursor in the browser, and surprisingly there are no games that abuse such technology. Also, the battery doesn’t last too long when playing music. Ah well there’s no perfect phone after all. — Sam Chan

Sanyo W42SA review [NikkeiBP]
Thumbwriting video [NikkeiBP]
Smooth-touch scrolling video [NikkeiBP]

Sanyo has started selling the expensive-looking T-SOLID SV-NS1 electric shaver before Christmas, claiming that it was the best-looking electric shaver they have ever made. The Impress team took it for a spin and liked what they saw. First off the whole redesigned handle and the slanted angle all turn out to be really ergonomic. The best part is perhaps the little door that you can open and flush water in to wash the blade without taking the whole head off, but when you take it off, the parts may appear flimsy sometimes. The T-SOLID shaver is selling for $90 right now in Japan, which is “good-value” by Japanese standard, our guess is that 30 bucks has gone to the design. Do check out that little door 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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