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Although much has been made of Sony’s recent resurgence under Sir Howard Stringer, the Tokyo monster may be surprised to learn that it has been toppled as the public’s favourite producer of quality electronics.

Next time you throw an old cellphone away, spare a thought for the engineers at Hokuto System in Japan, who have recycled their old handsets to make fully functional computers.

Multicore CPUs are already ten-a-penny, but who woulda thunk they’d soon be appearing in cellphones, cars and HD TV players and that they could hold the key to eliminating computer viruses?

It might seem odd that when the world’s first liquid-cooled hard drive is developed the companies behind it should trumpet it as being quieter, rather than more efficient or faster, but that’s the motivation behind the new device from NEC and Hitachi of Japan.

There has been plenty of talk about the power of the Cell processor at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 since the chip project began in 2000, but precious little in the way of end results until today, when Sony announced a prototype computer board using the powerhouse processor.

Until Apple stuck a magnetic holder for its multimedia remote control on the side of the most recent iMacs, it was generally accepted that magnets should be kept well away from computer screens. Now that’s no longer a consideration, we’re starting to see more magnetised material in peripherals, such as this first magnetic keyboard.

Internet searches for more obscure topics can sometimes feel like the old needle-and-haystack conundrum - if what you want is out there at all, finding it can be a stretch, even for Google. Images and video present an even greater challenge - unless they’re tagged or labeled accurately, it’s often a matter of wading through thousands of possible matches.

When it comes to Japan, it’s commonplace to see a lot of drivel and preconceptions pushed as fact by ill-informed Western media, particularly when it comes to stories about technology and how it is used there.