Jogging might be good for your body but just how many brain cells die of boredom in the process? Swimming laps is perhaps a more palatable exercise method but it doesn't lag running by too much in the boredom stakes. What serious pool lappers need is a waterproof iPod, or some facsimile thereof. Century is giving it a go with the niftily named Dolphin Player. Not only is the gadget waterproof but a swimmer can dive up to 1 meter below the surface with the player on. The Dolphin consists of a lightweight aluminum cylinder, measuring about 11 cm by 2 cm, with waterproof earphones connected to it and can easily be attached to swimming goggles. The player has a capacity of 1 gigabyte, handles both MP3 and WMA file formats and the battery lasts for eight hours on one recharge. It is on sale for 12,800 yen with more information available at www.century-direct.net/
Dial to impress: Using your mobile phone as a fashion statement is hardly novel, but NTT DoCoMo is cranking up the conspicuous consumption ante to a new level with its new Dolce & Gabbana handset. The D&G M702iS, a localized version of the Motorola RAZR, carries a 75,000 yen price tag. Apart from the prominent gold-colored branding on the phone, your fashion statement consists of an eel skin case, a D&G strap, some on-screen graphics and four original ring tones. Backing up its claims to exclusivity, it will only be on sale online, either via i-mode or through DoCoMo's Web site, and in old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar D&G stores. The phone is on sale until the end of May.
Top-notch video: Life at the top is fleeting in electronics. Just five months after announcing the HDC-SD1, which Panasonic trumpeted as the first video camera able to record high-definition TV images to an SD memory card, the electronics giant is trumping it with the HDC-SD3. The new model ups the resolution to 1920 x 1080i pixels, compared to its sibling's 1440 x 1080i. Both the old and new cameras use the relatively new AVCHD compression technique to fit high-definition video onto current-generation media, such as the SD cards. A similarly revamped DVD camcorder, the HDC-DX3, has also been announced. The HDC-SD3 is expected to cost 150,000 yen and come with a 4-gigabyte SDHC card.