Newer, Smaller, Faster, and Not in Stores Now

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Note I have had a lot of success with www.dynamism.com

Dave


Newer, Smaller, Faster, and Not in Stores Now

May 8, 2003
By JEFFREY SELINGO 




 

ONE of the hottest gadgets in Japan these days is a set of
clip-on headphones with enough memory in just one tiny
earpiece for an hour's worth of downloaded music.

But it may be years before the headphones appear in
American electronics stores, if they do at all. The
manufacturer, Sharp, along with other Japanese companies,
tests most new products with domestic consumers first.
Sometimes the products eventually make it to the United
States market; others never do.

For years, American consumers have had to travel to Japan
for some of the latest gadgets and then cope with manuals,
software and keyboards in Japanese. If they ran into
problems, they were out a lot of yen, because the
manufacturer's warranty was not valid outside Japan.

But several retailers are now making it easier to purchase
and use new products ordinarily unavailable in the United
States, selling never-exported laptop computers, digital
cameras and other gadgets through the Web.

The companies mark up the prices as much as 30 to 50
percent to pay for express shipping, technical support and
a one-year warranty. The products come modified with
English-language software, controls and manuals and with AC
adapters for North American electrical outlets.

The idea of owning before others do is what seems to
motivate shoppers at Web sites including www.dynamism.com
and www.japan-direct.com. Because the prices are high -
most laptops, for instance, cost at least $2,000 - many of
the customers are senior-level executives or entrepreneurs
who, through travel or work, are already familiar with
products that are hot in Japan.

"For some people it's about keeping up with the people next
door," said Douglas Krone, the founder and chief executive
officer of Dynamism. "If somebody buys a notebook from us
and goes to a company meeting the next day, we'll
inevitably get calls from two or three other people who saw
the notebook and want the same thing."

Demetrius Bush, a manufacturing manager for Duracell in
South Carolina, recently paid $345 to Japan-Direct for the
palm-size Sharp MT-AV1 video player, which hooks up to a
television and can record up to an hour of video for
playback on a tiny liquid-crystal display screen. Mr. Bush
uses the player while traveling to catch up on movies and
television shows. "I like toys and gadgets," he said.

A few weeks ago, while waiting for a flight in the Atlanta
airport, Mr. Bush pulled out the player to watch a movie. A
few people sitting near him, some viewing DVD's on their
bulky laptops, stared in amazement.

He gets similar stares when he uses the Sony Vaio PCG-U3
laptop that he bought from Japan-Direct several months ago
for nearly $2,000 (it now costs $1,699 at Japan-Direct and
$1,899 at Dynamism). It weighs less than 2 pounds and is
barely more than 7 inches wide, yet packs a lot of punch (a
933-megahertz processor, 256 megabytes of memory and a
20-gigabyte hard drive).

For gadget lovers, "Japanese stuff is just so much cooler
than what you can get in the U.S.,'' said Erich Andren of
Minneapolis, who purchased a SpyZ camera ($89), which is
small enough to fit on his key chain, from Dynamism.
Although the camera doesn't have an L.C.D. screen and the
image quality is "terrible," Mr. Andren said he liked
having it at his fingertips because he is on the road most
of the day for his job as a computer technician. "I always
see funny things driving around, so it's great to snap
quick pictures to show friends," he said.

Such products often get their start in Japan. Electronics
companies release products there first because Japanese
consumers are willing to pay for the newest technology in
the smallest package. Americans, on the other hand, are
most interested in the lowest price, Mr. Krone said. So
companies use their Japanese market to learn how to produce
a product inexpensively before introducing it in the United
States. 

Laptops are by far the most popular item among American
customers looking for the latest technology from Japan,
said Randy Parks, director of sales for Japan-Direct.
"Japanese laptops are designed to be small because it's a
mobile society and they don't have a lot of space," he
said. "American laptops are designed with one thing in
mind: price." 

Some of the hot sellers in Japan these days include the new
Sony Vaio U101, which is designed to be operated while the
user is sitting or standing and comes with features that
allow a user to rotate the screen or zoom in to enlarge the
font size ($1,999 at both Dynamism and Japan-Direct,
although neither company is shipping them yet). At 2.4
pounds, the Toshiba Libretto L5 weighs a bit more than the
Sony notebooks, but it includes a full-size keyboard and a
10-inch-wide screen ($1,899 at Dynamism and $1,655 at
Japan-Direct). 

"These laptops are not clumsy-looking like American
laptops,'' said Jerry Kane, president of a beef processing
company in Texas, who has purchased several laptops from
Dynamism for his family-owned business. "You really can
take them anywhere."

Other popular Japanese products include a remote-controlled
toy helicopter that weighs less than four ounces and is so
small that you can fly it indoors ($652 at Japan-Direct).
For runners, there are the clip-on earphones, Sony NW-E8P
($446 at Japan-Direct).

Despite demand, some popular Japanese gadgets cannot be
sold to American customers. Some, like many cellphones, are
incompatible with American technology, or are too expensive
to ship or modify. Japan-Direct, for instance, does not
sell televisions, because of their size, or camcorders with
Japanese prompts in the viewfinder. Both companies stop
selling the Japanese version of a product when it becomes
available in the United States.

The consumer who wants to sample everything that Japanese
consumers can get at home still has to travel to Akihabara,
the electronics shopping district in Tokyo, said Mr. Krone
of Dynamism. Even so, he said, his sales have doubled every
year since the company started in 1997, although he still
ships fewer than 100,000 products annually.

"This is a niche market," he said. "After all, if demand is
too large, then the manufacturers will just sell the
products themselves."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/technology/circuits/08wait.html?ex=1053442
891&ei=1&en=5940ebc3c1ec56f6



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