Music synthesizers have come long way.

The first practical machine, Moog modular synthesizer, was so gigantic and heavy it could be safely stored only in an airport hangar. The band that utilized this behemoth extensively for its tour, Pink Floyd, was rumored to have employed thousands of slaves only for trasporting its Moog from one concert to the next. That number far exceeded the manpower of Pharaos' peasants when they built the Pyramid some 5,000 years ago.

Yamaha's TENORI-ON synthesizer.

That was quite inevitable. Because, then in 1960s, Moog had no chips and ICs but bulky diodes and transistors only.
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This is what you get when you travel in the hopelessly monolingual US and try to login to your home site from a public terminal, say, in a public library.

Art Lebedov Studio's Optimus Maximus Keyboard. Magic keytops with a tiny LCD display studded.

In this era of globalization, some poor folks still firmly stick to their claustrophobic linguistic pit, and shut their eyes and ears. Europian situation (except, again, the UK) is much better. And, these days, Asian countries (except, again, Japan) fare much, much better.
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These days, the legendary Japanese "salaryman" can forgo his yoke... I mean, his necktie, or even his gutter rat-colored suit once considered as de rigueur attire for the business life. Nobody frowns anymore if he sported a short-sleeved shirt of gay color in stifling summer office. Times, they're a-changin'.

You lose one, you gain one. Instead, one item has been added to the daily life of our business warriors. Yes, of course, a laptop computer or two.

21st-century salaryman has to carry around this heavy burden wherever he goes. Visiting customer's firm, at conference room, on a crowded commuter plane, even while playing truant at nearby Starbucks... his laptop always accompanies him.

Nobody cares how he uses it. I know quite a few upward mobile types who utilize their expensive laptops constantly and exculsively for playing Microsoft Solitude. No matter what, Japanese corporate life and laptops have been interlocked inseparably.
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Japanese incapability of learning foreign languages is rather legendary.

Most of us are keenly aware of the existence of some funny people in this world who bubble up some funny noise constantly. But again, most of us can't simply understand that that "noise" can convey logic and emotion to other people.

A few anatomists have discovered that Japanese ears had a very efficient nose filter system which rejected all kinds of incomprehensible noise totally. Nobody has yet tried to adapt this integrated filter to a cheap noise-cancellation gear. Other scholars found Japanese eardrums were thicker than the world standard. Maybe that's why I didn't feel any pain in my ears when I dove more than 5m underwater last summer.

Citizen System's ED10C, electronic Chinese instructor. Your thick eardrums won't be much affected. Price, around 8,000 yen (US$80)

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Sony PSP has been soundly beaten by Nintendo DS in the sales field of portable game gears. Some diehard PSP partisans still faithfully stick to this bulky instrument. For speciality purpose, like portable navigation.

Sony PSP, with GPS receiver attached on the top.

PSP has an optional GPS unit, the GPS Receiver, and the combi works fine as a navigation device with navigation/map software. Presently, the most popular of them in Japan is Zenrin's "Minna no Chizu" (Everybody's Map), the newest edition being ver. 3.
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