Silence is golden: Sanyo and NS-ELEX have unveiled their new earphone microphone, e-Mimi-kun. Using bone-conduction audio technology, it is designed to cut out background noise, the bane of modern life, and boost the quality of your sound transmission. If you are talking on your cell phone, for example, you simply plug the unit into your ear and transmit your voice, with no background noise, to the person you are talking to, and listen to their voice too. Beyond cell phones, the gadget can be used with any device into which a microphone can be plugged. Silence comes at a price, with the wired version due in April at ¥40,000 and a wireless version, using Bluetooth, to cost ¥60,000.

Organic sound: JVC is not afraid to be different either. Its new HP-FX500 high-end earphones are made mainly from wood, and apparently improved audio quality was the motivation for the unusual choice of materials. The unit boasts a pretty good frequency range, at 8 Hz to 25 kHz, at 100 dB/1 mW, with an impedance of 16 ohms. The earphones are out now, priced ¥15,000.

Smarter idiot box: Fujitsu is set to release an upgraded version of its TEO desktop PC, first released in January last year. The computer is designed to be plugged straight into a television, and Fujitsu has upped the ante by adding a Blu-ray high-definition disc drive to its top-drawer version (the TEO90Y/D). Unfortunately, Fujitsu didn't redesign the TEO, which at best can be described as looking "functional." The specs of the new TEO include a 500-GB hard-disk drive, 1.6-GB Core 2 Duo chipset, 2 gigabytes of RAM and an ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 graphics engine. No word on pricing or release date as yet, but expect to see it in the coming weeks.