Originally posted by eddie1960 I'm with Aristophanes and Ash here, the product looks to be quite interesting for it's target market
I don't see the target market, Eddie. If it's domestic, I think that it's a non-starter: the mobile phone is a much larger part of life in Japan than it is in the West. Email, sharing photos, using Mixi on your phone, these all require the presence of .. the phone. Home PC's were never as big in Japan as they got here, and they've been steadily waning for years. Meanwhile, you can't see anything worth looking at in that country without someone at hand taking a photo with a mobile phone.
I don't think that anything that sails this close to the mobile phone image quality offers any utility that the mobile phone doesn't. Just to come up to par with the sharing capability of a mobile phone, Hoya would have to offer dead-simple integration with email and the proprietary Internet systems of the carriers, which would require an add-on service for each carrier to be interested. And that's just to match the utility of the mobile phone's similarly-sized sensor.
At the other end of the spectrum, Japanese women have no trouble using DSLR's.
Back in the Auto 110 days there was nothing like the mobile phone (an imaging device that people carried every day anyway) to compete with. I think the time for a small odd-ball like this is well past.