Japanese telecommunications operatorKDDIis developing a smartphone which can accurately recreate the sensation of using physical buttons on a touch panel. Using fingers to swipe, press and flick to perform certain actions on touchscreens is a new and easy way to interact with devices. The problem with it, however, is that the glass is unresponsive and doesn’t provide any feedback to the user, which makes it hard to tell if they have already selected a button....

The iPhone may soon be available on more than one carrier in Japan as the iPhone 5 is coming to competitor KDDI, reportsNikkei Business. The publication quotes ‘officials’ that are saying that KDDI has obtained a contract to sell the upcoming iPhone in Japan and will sell it under its ‘au’ brand starting in November. This would end the single carrier monopoly on Apple’s iPhone that has existed since Softbank, a relatively new wireless subscriber established in 2006, signed on to carry the iPhone 3G in Japan in 2008....

Ever had trouble dealing with stubborn kids who pout and throw tantrums when in public? It’s something most parents have to deal with, and it could prove to be both humiliating and tiresome. There might be a solution for that. Kinda. This half-ingenious, half-crazy gadget invented by a Japanese scientist will make sure your kids smile when you want them to. It’s called the Electro Smile and it works by putting on the contraption shown in the image above, which constantly sends electric shocks to a child’s cheeks, triggering the muscles in their face to force an insincere smile–complete with a jolt that excites the entire body....

Reutersreports that Japanese mobile social gaming firm Gree is aiming to reach up to a billion users worldwide to rival Facebook, the company’s founder and chief executive said. “We are aiming for 500 million to a billion users, though we don’t have a timeframe, or particular countries,” Yoshikazu Tanaka said. “Facebook is said to have 700 million, and we are also aiming for that level,” he added. Gree grew rapidly in Japan due to the spread of sophisticated feature phones in the country....

While people around the world have been struggling to learn foreign languages, Japanese operatorNTT Docomojust demonstrated a cloud-based automatic interpretation service that interprets voice in real-time. During the demo, the Docomo staff read a newspaper article in Japanese, which is then interpreted to English in real-time, which is to a receiving device. It was made possible by integrating of a range of the best existing technologies from around the world — such as voice recognition, machine translation, and voice synthesis....