You know when a given country, in this case the nation of Japan, is over-saturated with cell phones when you get to see something like this: A cell phone that’s supposed to be similar in shape to a chocolate bar, available in two versions: Melty Bitter (brown) and Melty Strawberry (pink). The Sharp SH-04B [JP] is part of NTT Docomo’s winter line-up of new handsets for the Japanese market (unveiled ten days ago).

Faster data access with virtually no latency: LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile broadband networks are coming, at least in the world’s most advanced mobile market, the nation of Japan. The country’s biggest cell phone carrier, NTT Docomo, said yesterday at GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong it will go fourth generation as early as December 2010.

Android is still in its infancy in Japan where most domestic makers still stick with their proprietary operating systems, with basically no one outside the geek community knowing what it is. But things are changing slowly. Last week, SoftBank (the country’s third biggest cell phone carrier) announced an Android-powered phone for next year when the company announced their new models for the next months.

And yesterday, Sharp announced at an event in Tokyo it will roll out a yet to be specified number of Android-based handsets as early as the first half of next year. Sharp commands the biggest market share of all eight cell phone makers in Japan so this is very good news for the Google OS in what is the most advanced mobile society in the world.

Following KDDI’s announcement three weeks ago, Japan’s biggest cell phone carrier NTT Docomo today unveiled [JP] its winter-line up of cell phones (SoftBank, the No.3, did the same). And here are all the new models announced by Docomo for the Japanese market today.

Update:
Head over to NTT Docomo’s English web site for another overview of their new phones.

KDDI did it as early as last month, and today it was NTT Docomo’s and SoftBank’s turn to unveil their line-ups of new cell phones for the Japanese market. Here are all of SoftBank’s 17 future models [JP], which will be sold in Japan from this fall through spring 2010.

Japan went crazy over the iPhone when it made its debut in summer last year, but China as another big Asian market for Apple seems to react differently. The iPhone officially launched in China today, offered by China Unicom, one the country’s three big cell phone carriers. But our friends over at major Chinese news portal 163.com are reporting [Google machine translation] that not too many people were actually queuing up to get one, at least in Beijing.

Earlier this week, I was in Kunshan, China, to attend the 3G Industry Summit [CN], a four-day event that has attracted a few dozen speakers and an audience of over 200 people, making it one of the biggest of its kind in this country. The annual event is organized by the Kunshan government and Mobile 2.0 Forum, a communication platform with more than 1,500 members, almost single-handedly run by industry veteran Leo Wang.

The summit reassured me of one thing: The Chinese market for mobile hardware, software and contents is big already and it’s bound to become huge in the very near future.

Information and stats on China’s mobile web sector and profiles of 16 Chinese mobile startups after the jump.

Toshiba has been announcing fuel cells for home use for ages now, but it seems the announcement [press release in English] they made today is really serious. The company has unveiled the Dynario today, a mini fuel cell that can charge mobile devices on the go. Japanese mobile gadget geeks can already order the fuel cell on Toshiba Japan’s online store (where it’s available exclusively).

Japan’s second biggest mobile phone carrier KDDI au showed their new cell phones [JP] for this winter. The first of the eleven models will be available in Japan as early as this month.

Complete line-up after the jump.

Fuel cells, those electrochemical conversion devices, which are supposed to make the lives of gadget freaks easier, are still a hot topic in the alternative energy sector even though the technology hasn’t penetrated the mass market yet. Toshiba, for example, has been experimenting with fuel cells for quite some time now. And the company has now announced the development of a fuel-cell based cell phone that’s just 22mm thick.

The main achievement here is that this prototype is about 50% thinner than Toshiba’s previous one (which you see in the picture), marking another step towards commercialization in the future. The phone runs on methanol and doesn’t need to be charged.

The first rumors started spreading about two weeks ago, and it was officially announced yesterday: Major Japanese cell phone makers Hitachi, NEC and Casio are merging their mobile phone operations to become Japan’s No. 2 maker (following Sharp). The name of the new venture will be “NEC Casio Mobile Communications”.

“Location” has been one of the most frequently used buzzwords in the web industry recently, with i.e. Twitter, Facebook and Google having substantially stepped up efforts in that area in the last few months. TechCrunch has always been particularly bullish about location-based mobile social networks, with Loopt, Brightkite or, most recently, Foursquare among the big names.

But there are more location-based social networks out there, and one of them, Centrl, is now intending to further bridge the gap between mobile phone users and the web at large (a move we called for last year). The service, which has been available on the iPhone [iTunes link], Android, BlackBerry [JAD file] and Nokia since May 2008, extended its offering with a web app a few days ago.

Japan’s No. 2 cell phone carrier KDDI au is stepping up its efforts to promote its iida sub brand of designer cell phones (here’s my photo report of some iida concept phones from back in April). Not only did it present its robotic cell phone Polaris today, it now gives us another two (more conventional) phones.

And these you can actually buy soon (if you live in Japan).

Japan is the nation of robots. Everybody knows that. It’s also the nation of cell phones. So why not mix robots and cell phones? That’s what the country’s second biggest mobile phone provider KDDI au thought and today presents the iida Polaris, a robotic cell phone [link in English], for the first time (click here for my iida concept photo report from April).

Japan is a tough market to crack for many non-Japanese cell phone makers, and even the world’s leading cell phone maker, Nokia, had to give up its Japan operations after having failed to gain a foothold in this country (in November last year). But they’re trying again, this time with their luxury brand Vertu.

Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, the country’s biggest mobile phone subscriber with over 50 million subscribers, is considering fully entering the American cell phone market – as early as next year. Various Japanese media are reporting that the company plans to offer phones featuring DoCoMo’s proprietary mobile web service “i-mode” in the USA (the picture shows phones from their Japanese summer line-up).

It’s not really a secret that Japan is absolutely crazy about cell phones. And even though domestic makers churn out more than 100 different handsets every year (some of which are simply amazing), the iPhone is selling over here. SoftBank Mobile, the country’s exclusive iPhone provider, doesn’t release official data, but estimates put sales in Japan at well over one million units so far – not bad at all in this hopelessly over-saturated market. In other words, Japan doesn’t hate the iPhone, as some blogs suggested in the past. It never did.

The local developer community has noticed and produced a slew of apps aimed at a global audience. What follows is my subjective selection of the “best” of these made-in-Japan apps, all of which are at least available in English. (I left out iPhone games released by big companies such as Capcom, Konami, Sega or Namco to focus on apps created by startups or individuals based in Japan instead.)

My personal favorite is a free (and fantastic) GPS-based photo sharing app called Memory Tree (just like all the apps in the following list, it works worldwide). But here’s a round-up of all the 32 apps I chose, grouped in six categories (games, productivity, tools, photography and art, music, and everything else).

Big news from Japan’s mobile phone industry today (Friday afternoon Japanese time). Various Japanese media are reporting that NEC, Hitachi and Casio are in talks to merge their cell phone operations to become Japan’s second biggest manufacturer, following Sharp.

Reportedly, NEC plans to integrate its cell phone business into a tie-up that already exists between Hitachi and Casio. According to rumors, NEC wants to take a majority stake in the new entity, which would then control about 20% of the Japanese cell phone market.

Major Chinese news portal 163.com is reporting [Google machine translation] that Apple has finally signed a deal with China Unicom to bring the iPhone 3G to mainland China in October. This is huge news for Apple, which is now to enter a market with around 700 million mobile phone users, the biggest in the world (US: around 270 million).

Following months of negotiations between Apple and China Unicom, “industry insiders” are reportedly expecting an official announcement to be made by the country’s second biggest mobile telecommunications company tomorrow in Hong Kong.

Everyone pretty much agrees that Japan boasts the most advanced mobile infrastructure in the world. After all, this is the country with 100 million 3G subscribers, 120 new handsets every year, the first mobile phone featuring a decent web browser (in 1999) etc. etc.

But it’s pretty hard to keep up with what’s going in Japan’s super-vibrant mobile world if you don’t live here (I’m trying to keep MobileCrunch readers informed with my postings), which is why I’d like to recommend a new(ish) site called Infinita.tv that I recently stumbled upon.

TechCrunch first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market eight days ago. Some pieces of information on the so-called Mini 3i leaked a few days after, and today the Android device finally saw the light of day during a China Mobile event in Beijing (China Mobile is the world’s biggest phone carrier and distributes the phone in that country).

It seems Japan, the country with the most advanced mobile infrastructure on the globe, has come to embrace the iPhone. According to a survey conducted by market research company GfK’s Japanese subsidiary [JP], the 32GB model of the iPhone 3GS was the most popular phone in Japan last month.

Despite being able to choose between an enormous number of super-advanced cell phones for years now, the Japanese have come to embrace the iPhone. The number of iPhones in circulation is estimated to have topped the 1 million mark quite some time ago, which triggered SoftBank BB (a sister company of Japan-exclusive iPhone provider SoftBank Mobile) to start offering something very Japanese and unique today: handmade iPhone cases [JP] priced at $1,000 each.

I’m aware studies comparing cell phone charges generally have to be taken with a grain of salt (especially cross-country studies like the following one), but this one coming from the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is pretty interesting.

It’s not really a “world” ranking, but the ministry compared [JP, PDF] cell phone charges in seven major cities in Europe, Asia and the US. The result in a nutshell: New Yorkers are pretty lucky, Parisians aren’t.

We broke the news on Dell launching a China-only cell phone on Sunday, and today major Chinese news portal 163.com reports the device is on its way: What Dell will be offering in China is an Android-powered “Ophone” called the mini3i.

China Mobile, the world’s biggest carrier, will distribute the device and plans to launch it as early as “in the middle of this month” (which could mean any day this week). China Mobile plans to establish Ophone as a new brand and sell a number of devices from different makers under it. Apart from Dell, Lenovo and another Chinese company called Dopod [CN] (aka HTC) are expected to release Ophones in the next few days.