Takara Secret Base

Question: Have you always wanted to be a captain of a Yamato or Gundam battle cruiser *AND* also just happened to be fed up of your PC environment? Well read on
Yesterday was the first day of the WPC EXPO 2005 and there was something most interesting (?) at the Takara booth. As you know, Takara are a maker of Toys n Figures in Japan - one of their new lines is aimed at 20 - 30 year old Japanese Otaku. The toys in question are actually USB PC peripherals from their "Lets Make a Secret Base" series...Above: Apart from resembling a lever that one would normally use to propel yer battle cruiser into warp speed, this little guy is an application launcher - so much for the boring app stationed in your Dock or Taskbar. There are five buttons on the Fire Launcher which you can program to do things like erm, launch apps. Above: The Storm Blaster - not only does it resemble some sort of cannon on White Base, it opens up with a "something-opening-with-a-mechanical-sound" type noise and doubles up as a.....fan. Usefull for when you have guests over and they start farting in your house - just pretend to blow them away with this.Above: And what about the Gritter Panel? You can set it to warn you when you have new mail, have the contents of the mail scroll across the panel, display CPU levels and network usage ETC - I thought it sounded silly at first but it sounds like fun - especially if you have a long USB cable - you can stick this in the toilet or something and read your mail as it comes in.Above: Shutting down your computer is no longer a boring click/select/click action anymore - thanks to the Emergency Button. A movie of an "ultimate weapon" plays before shutdown but you can set any movie to play and you can have the button do other stuff too.Above: But wait! Theres more (more?) - lots more to come from Takara - looks like they are bringing out a ton more usefull (?) USB PC peripherals.
Screenshots and news source from ITMedia