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Salarymen stick with laptops over iPads

by Japan Times

When Yuta Moriya was offered Apple Inc.'s 613-gram iPad by his employer last summer, he envisioned a future free of lugging his laptop around for client visits. He was wrong. "I used to have to carry my laptop, a charger and some brochures," said Moriya, 29, a used-car salesman at Tokyo-based Gulliver International Co. "After the iPad, I carried the iPad, a charger for the iPad, the laptop, the charger for the laptop and the brochures." Salarymen like Moriya are reluctant to embrace iPad tablets, the fastest-growing segment in the computer industry, because they aren't light enough or functional enough to replace laptops in Japan. (Japan Times)

Show goes on for Japan's Fuji Rock festival

by AFP

As Japan plunged into crisis with a triple earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in March, organisers of the Fuji Rock Festival were faced with a choice over whether the show should go on. In the aftermath, "audiences didn?t want to go to concerts," said Johnnie Fingers, director of the Fuji Rock festival organising company SMASH. "Japan needed time for healing." However, Fingers -- aka John Moylett -- a pop pianist and founding member of new wave band The Boomtown Rats featuring Bob Geldof, said it was clear that staging the festival this year would give tens of thousands of fans a release from the steady drum beat of bad news. A number of Japanese music festivals will take place this summer as the nation strives to return to a semblance of normality following the disasters that ravaged its northeast coast and left more than 20,000 dead or missing. (AFP)