Look at these tiny dice-like ipod speakers by Buffalo and Kokuyo. The OTOKORO [the name of the dice-speakers series] use the dock connector for power from the device and requires no bulky AC adapter. The speakers weight at around 14 grams and will set you back around $27 [¥ 2,660.00] and you can get them here

As iphone 3.0 gets closer and closer to shipping more and more companies give us a glimpse of what they have in store for all those iphone users. A Tokyo-based company called Genkii is working at creating a new 3D avatar-based virtual world [called Sparkle 3D] like Second Life and Project Entropia.

Apparently Genkii had been working on Sparkle 3D for quite some time, but they still have not released any details on when the app will be available. Sparkle will utilize the new iphone OS 3.0 technologies like peer to peer networking and the micro-payment system. The potential for a 3D avatar-based virtual world tailor-made for the iphone [and ipod touch] economy could be enormous for the company. According to TechCrunch, the company is now actively seeking angel investment to accelerate development of Sparkle 3D.

The only app Genkii has in the App Store is a $5 IM app that ties into your Second Life IM account. The company has also been working on its One Coin Comics project which aims to bring interactive comic book to the iphone masses.

Image via [TechCrunch]

We all know that iphone native apps that enabled emoji are no longer available at the iTunes app store. It turns out you can still get them through iphone web apps like Emojinator. This fun web app enables you to use the popular Japanese Emoji icons on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Emojinator uses no hacks to enable Emoji - it is completely safe. The desired Emoji icons are listed on the web app’s site for you to chose. Once every Emoji you want is selected, you can send them to Mail with the push of a button. The most recently used Emojis are stored at the top of the list for your convenience even between visits. This web app only works on iPhone or iPod touch because the Emoji icons are special unicode characters only interpreted by these devices.

We have received a lot of emails regarding Apple’s strategy. As we suspected Apple has a multi-carrier strategy throughout europe, with the exception of mainly countries like Britain, Germany, Spain and Austria.

In fact out of the 10 countries that Vodafone had announced deals back in May 2008, in 7 of them there is not an exclusive deal. [Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey]. We suspect that there are no exclusive deals in Portugal, South Africa or New Zealand either. This is probably GOOD news for those of you who live in Portugal, South Africa or New Zealand. We cannot confirm whether there were exclusive deals that lapsed or not. So drop us a comment on whether in your country there was an exclusive deal or not.

It turns out that Apple has been pretty open to multi-carrier deals around the globe. You can go and check it out yourselves at Apple’s site [Thanks to Dan and Clarissa for pointing that out].