UPDATE 8th May 2010: iPad shipping in Japan on 28th May 2010. No Japanese pricing announced as yet.

UPDATE 15th April 2010 : International orders have been delayed. iPad shipping internationally in late May and Japanese pre-orders start May 10th 2010.

Okay I’ll get it out of the way early – I’m an Apple fanboy and have been for a very long time.

So the news this week that the iPad will debut in the US on April 3 was pretty exciting.

What’s more exciting however, is that the iPad will also be available in Australia (where I live) and Japan (where I want to live) plus Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

While we have to wait a little longer, those of us outside the US will get to choose from all models at once and will also have the luxury of a month worth of user feedback from sales in the US.

I can’t wait to try one out and I am especially excited about the Japanese learning apps that will hopefully be released for the iPad in the coming months. The huge touchscreen will make for an awesome kanji stroke practice pad!

I’m leaning towards the 64GB Wi-Fi model – how about you?

iPad TV Ad

US Pricing

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of US$499 for 16GB, US$599 for 32GB, US$699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available for a suggested retail price of US$629 for 16GB, US$729 for 32GB and US$829 for 64GB.

• App Giveaway: Japanese 101 Particles
• Canon debuts ground-breaking EOS 7D
• Japan Signs: Tokyo Fruit Juice Bar
• App Review: KanjiPop
• Japan Signs: Waiting Room

This week Google introduced a new look and feel for it’s online translation service, Google Translate.

Previously the system allowed the user to input the foreign word or phrase and then hit the “Translate” button to view the answer. This, of course, wasn’t that much of a chore but the instant translation sure feels a whole lot better – even if the results aren’t.

I did a quick test with a recent twitter from dannychoo.

Input: アーマー部品日本に置いてきちゃった！

Entering this tweet with the exclamation mark resulted in “Armor Parts I left it in Japan!” but removing the exclamation mark gave me a whole different answer – “I left it in Japanese Armor Parts”. I tested with several other Japanese phrases and received similar quality results.

For a free service, it is great and will certainly give you a good idea of what is being said but let’s just say that I wouldn’t use it to do up a resume for that job at Microsoft in Tokyo you really wanted to nail. (^_^)

Other improvements are the ability to view a romanisation of phrases written in the likes of Japanese or Chinese and for non-English speaking users the new text-to-speech service will provide an audio snippet for the translated word or phrase. Hopefully this is extended to other languages, like Japanese, in the future.

See the video below for a full overview of the new features.

• Google Japan animates Street View concerns
• Use Twitter To Improve Your Japanese
• Japan Signs: Soup Nazi Barber
• Mnemonics: Learn Japanese Faster
• Canon debuts ground-breaking EOS 7D

The graphic (available here) shows the top 20 nations by internet costs and speeds around the world as ordered by the ITIF Broadband Rankings. As an Australian, it is a sickening day when New Zealand beat us at anything….let alone broadband speeds (^_^)

Taking the number one spot is Japan, however, the global superpower USA languished in 15th place.

Apart from Japan’s propensity for technology, I think the obvious, and perhaps major, difference between the two countries in terms of broadband cost and coverage is geographic. The same would have to be said in Australia, where we have reasonably good broadband in most capital cities but the regional areas suffer in that regard.

Japan’s land mass totals just 374,744 km² while the 50 states of the US total – 9,826,630 km², well over 25 times the area to cover with a fibre network.

The top five countries in the rankings stand out as small (in terms of land mass), well populated countries, which makes it cheaper and easier to get decent size pipes out to more people. Of course, there are many small countires with poor broadband and that’s where factors such as government policies come in to play.

What is the broadband like in your country? Do you think it has more to do with government mismanagement than geographic issues?

Via Gizmodo and Zach Klein

• Honda introduces Segway-like U3-X
• Learn Katakana: Japanese Computer Terms
• Yann Arthus-Bertrand: Japan From Above
• Similar Kanji: Icicle vs Eternity
• Hotel Claska, Tokyo: Room 502

In addition to my love of all things Japanese, I am a hopeless gadget nut, so I’ll be sneaking more tech news in to zonjineko! but I will be keeping it just to gadgets made in or available in Japan…okay yep I know that’s pretty much everything!

Firstly let me admit I am a big Canon fan from way back and currently own a 5D Mark II and I think it is the best camera I have ever purchased.

I bought the 5D Mark II at Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara (7 storeys of gadget heaven) when I was last in Tokyo several months ago. The full HD video mode, full-frame sensor and outstanding high ISO performance did the deal for me and so I nervously laid down the credit card for the AUD$3,500+ purchase (damn Aussie dollar against the yen) but it is worth every cent.

As is always the case in the land of gadgets, a new model is always just around the corner and so it was with some sense of inevitability that the much-rumoured Canon 7D was announced recently and what an announcement it was.

The 7D has a simply amazing list of features for this price range and will bring the whole DSLR Full HD video thing to a whole new market, which is going to be great for everybody.

For my use, the only letdown with 7D, if you could even call it that, is the lack of a full-frame sensor but maybe that is not going to bother the customers that Canon is targeting with this camera.

I’m very thankful it wasn’t full frame as I really wanted a full frame DSLR with a fast frame rate but couldn’t justify the cost of a 1D Mark III. I may just have had to slap myself down for buying my 5D Mark II if that was the case.

With the release of the 7D, Canon has firmly drawn the line in the sand and it will be intriguing to see what Nikon will announce next to compete at what is essentially a whole new price point/feature matrix. Never before has there been so much camera technology packed in to such a low price tag – US$1699.

Features

• 18 megapixel CMOS Sensor
• Dual DIGIC 4 Image Processors
• ISO 100-6400 (expandable to 12,800)
• 8 fps
• Full HD Video at 1920×1080 (30p/24p/25p), 1280×720 (60p/50p) and 640×480 (60p/50p)
• Intelligent Viewfinder with 100% field of view
• New 19-point, all cross-type AF system
• Magnesium body with shutter durability up to 150,000 cycles

Pricing and Availability

The Canon EOS 7D Digital SLR camera is scheduled for release in the US at the end of September 2009, and will be sold in a body-only configuration at an estimated retail price of US$1,699.00.

It will also be offered in a kit version with Canon’s new EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM zoom lens at an estimated retail price of US$1,899.00.

The Canon WFT-E5A wireless file transmitter is scheduled to be available in early November 2009 and sell at an estimated retail price of US$699.99.

Camera Words

As this is a Japanese blog I guess we better learn some words today. In the table below are a selection of several camera-related words to test your katakana and kanji knowledge.

Try also reading through the text on the 7D website at Canon Japan for more practice and use a site like Tangorin if you want to look up any words you don’t know – make sure you give it your best shot before you look them up otherwise you’re not going to learn anything.

Heads Up Katakana Newbies

The words marked with an asterisk above feature two katakana quirks you may not have seen. The first is the small tsu (ッ), also known as sokuon (促音), in the word レンズキット, which works the same as the hiragana small tsu (っ) by indicating the need to double the consonant that follows it. Check out my small tsu article or at Wikipedia for more on the tricky small tsu.

CMOSセンサー and CFカード both feature the katakana syllable ー called a chōonpu (長音符), which indicates to the reader that they need to double the last vowel of the previous syllable. For example, in CMOSセンサー the second last syllable is サ (SA), which is followed by ー so the sounds becomes SAA (サー) rather than SA (サ).

You may think the double up of a vowel doesn’t really matter but you only have to look at the words for Grandmother (おばあさん -> obaasan) and Aunt (おばさん -> obasan) to realise you could be in a whole world of pain at the next family dinner if you double your vowel to the wrong person.

• Japan Signs: Tokyo Fruit Juice Bar
• The Tale of the Little Tsu
• Google Japan animates Street View concerns
• Hiragana: The A Line
• Hiragana: The T Line