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Tokyo Game Show 2001


Go2Mac Japan bureau correspondent Francis A. Boisvert files this report from Tokyo:

Checked out the Tokyo Game Show here last Friday. Bill Gates did the keynote announcing their Xbox partnerships with Sega for game development and NTT Communications for broadband infrastructure as well as a controller pad specifically for the Japanese market that’s a bit smaller than the US unit.

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The ADSL and fiber optic broadband adapters were on display in the MS booth together with the console and pad.

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The show itself was a bit slow this year with Sony and Xbox drawing most of the attention. The new Playstation 2 titles of Final Fantasy X from Square and Grand Tourismo 3 from SCEI were the crowd pleasers.

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Sony’s new CLIE PEG-N700C goes on sale April 7th here in Japan for ¥49,800. Many of the shops have some review units on display and are taking advanced orders.

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The most striking feature of the unit is the new “frontlight” TFT color display at a resolution of 320 x 320 dots. Fonts are much clearer and color photos are beautiful!

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The unit uses a Dragonball VZ running at 33 Mhz under Palm OS 3.5. It has a Memory Stick slot with audio support letting you listen to ATRAC3 files. Sony will be selling a new 128 MB Memory Stick starting on April 10th. This will let you play two hours of music encoded at 132 kbps or 160 minutes of music encoded at 105 kbps.

The batteries will last 11 hours of music playing without the display on and three hours with. The unit seemed quite light and sure enough it’s only 160 grams. The new Clie comes with an USB cradle, stylus, stereo headphones, remote control for music operation, AC adapter, an install CD-ROM and soft cover for the unit. And probably no Mac OS support for some time, if ever…

By Jason O'Grady

Founded the PowerPage in 1995.