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The Wireless Japan exhibition near Tokyo this week has seen plenty of demonstrations of existing and future technologies, but there’s one that we’re still not sure how to categorize – fuel cells.

As if the mobile phones with 3.6Mbps internet connections that are relatively common in Japan weren’t enough, NTT DoCoMo has announced that it is working on technology to up that almost tenfold by 2009.

Sure, it’s still speculation, but we give some credence to suggestions of an iPhone launch in Japan when it comes straight from the horse’s mouth. The horse in this case is an Apple Japan account exec looking to place an ad in a particular Tokyo-published magazine.

It may have an unwieldy name but the Slate DT FeliCa from a consortium of firms in Japan could just be the key to getting the vast swathes of analogue holdouts online and into the brave new world of the internet.

Recidivist lawbreakers and people who need to be told what to do will probably benefit most from the latest Japanese car-navigation system from Nissan, which warns drivers of the dangers of drink-driving whether they’re Methodist ministers or hotel-chain heiresses.

DoCoMo just launched the 704i series of cellphones in Tokyo this afternoon - the latest handsets in the 700 series of simpler phones designed for the non-power users here.

Long ago, in the mists of time before email, a device called a facsimile machine once roamed the offices of the land before dying a swift death on a cold Thursday afternoon in early 1997. Except in Japan, that is, where domestic and office faxes alike are still evolving into something entirely new.

Although Japan still leads the world when it comes to pumping out gadgets, we really have to hand it to those up-and-coming Korean companies for their willingness to go the extra mile and add new features we never knew we needed. The latest unusual addition is a video projector that will be delivered to mobile phones sold by SK Telecom later this year.

Confirming the promise we saw in Sony’s GPS-shunning PlaceEngine application recently, comes the news that Japanese mapping giant Edia will use it in its next round of navigation software.

Reports from Japan say the first incident in a predicted wave of iPhone-centric street robberies has occurred a full two days before the US launch of Apple’s world-changing, famine-ending, disease-curing ‘Jesus phone’ that is destined to be all things to all men.

The largest city in western Japan has just seen the start of an unusual security trial that uses IC tags, GPS and drinks vending machines to make the streets a little safer.

The latest memory-chip development, announced today in Japan and the US by Toshiba, is a breakthrough in chip architecture that should lead to mobile phones with more compact designs and even more memory for file storage.

Here in Japan, Softbank Mobile - the brand Vodafone Japan transformed into last year - is about to launch a service that will surely appeal to the nation’s legendary drunken Friday-night salarymen who seem to have a habit of leaving their phones anywhere but their pockets.

Spending money can hardly get any easier than this – a new online shopping service in Japan allows shoppers to buy music CDs simply by taking a photograph of them with a cameraphone and to pay for them on credit by keying a PIN into the very same mobile phone.

The tense security climate that airlines worldwide currently operate in is now bringing an unexpected technical challenge for both passengers and staff, as Japanese carriers have been finding out recently.

We all know Sony for its games hardware, TVs, cameras and other audio-visual products, but it’s not such common knowledge that the company has a bleeding-edge research laboratory dedicated to exploring the technology of tomorrow just for the heck of it.

Never mind that puffed-up gizmo Apple is about to unleash, June 29 also sees the launch of the rather attractive smartphone you see in the photograph, which is about to become one of Japan’s hottest gadgets.

Among the oddest things we’ve seen in our tech travels round Japan is the internet umbrella built by two Tokyo students, Takashi Matsumoto and Sho Hashimoto. The device, which is currently hard to avoid in the Japanese media, combines several existing technologies to create a Blade Runner-style vision of a connected future.

Anyone in the market for a hype-free, yet simple and attractive mobile phone might want to take a quick look at Samsung’s latest designer phone, the SGH-E590, a super-lightweight beauty due out later this month.

Anyone who’s ever been through a major earthquake will immediately recognize the value of an early-warning system being planned by Japan’s largest mobile phone operators.

One of the most useful future technologies I’ve messed with recently is Fujitsu’s oddly named UBWALL (pronounced ‘U-B-Wall’), a giant plasma display panel loaded with RFID and Wi-Fi and intended for pushing information to all and sundry. Although it has been around for at least two years, the UBWALL has now found its first home outside the Fujitsu R&D labs.

From May 18 Japanese construction workers could be carrying more electronics than an Akihabara nerd after a hot day’s shopping, when Fujitsu Japan introduces its Fast IC remote-monitoring system.

The latest high-end mobile phone from Korean firm Pantech adds to the increasingly crowded touch-screen mobile market occupied by the Prada phone and the imminent iPhone, but does so with a different approach.

Satellite phone calls are set to come to the masses within a few years through the Japanese government’s plan to launch an orbiter with a ‘mega antenna’ so large ordinary cellphones will be able to pick up its signal with only slight modifications in their design.

Until this month, most folk in Europe probably weren’t terribly bothered about earthquakes or most other natural disasters, but recent events could make products like this Japanese mobile-phone hand-crank emergency charger a must-have.

Last month we looked at the next-generation barcodes commonly found in Japan and pondered why few people seem to actually use them. It seems we aren’t alone in thinking that something can be done to encourage their use, as the latest versions of the QR Codes now include images and video.

Mid-sized Japanese ISP and telecoms provider J:COM is launching a domestic security package that will rival, at least in part, the U-Consento service we saw from NTT last week in the intelligent-home stakes.

On a day when we’ve seen a few stories about getting our homes more wired, we have news of a Japanese system that allows users to remotely control home appliances via a cellphone.

During a busy week for Japan’s largest cellphone company, NTT DoCoMo, it has emerged that the firm has plans to use the nation’s ubiquitous phones as interactive health monitors.

When we brought you news on Japan’s latest feature-packed mobile phones yesterday we also promised to look into exactly how the new handsets will make use of their built-in gaming motion sensors.

The announcement of new mobile phones in Japan is done like most everything else in that most efficient of nations – with precise timing. NTT DoCoMo’s latest wave of handsets was unveiled as expected this afternoon and it includes plenty of innovative technology, from motion sensors to IC credit cards.

The continuing march of the limited-edition (Product) Red goods that are part of the eponymous charity’s drive to raise funds for AIDS relief and research across the world reached Japan today, when Motorola unveiled its red RAZR for the market here.

Ever wanted to have an alarm clock that can play the ringtones from your phone to wake you up in the morning? No, thought not, but that hasn’t stopped Citizen Japan from producing a clock which does exactly that.

Those of us happy to lead a quiet, perhaps even sedentary, life could be in for a jolt, as gym-going fitness freaks are about to get an even larger stick with which to beat us…

Cellphones in Japan are so much better than yours — heck, they even allow you to ruin your eyesight by squinting at FULL NOVELS on those tiny screens.