Japenese singer/songwriter JuJu released the song “Sunao Ni Naretara” (wish I could be true to myself)  at the beginning of 2009 and was heavily pushed via mobile.

With mobile videos being one of the most popular ways to consume music in Japan, record label Sony decided to use streamed music videos in an effort to target females in their teens and twenties.

I know what you’re thinking..”but aren’t streamed videos on mobile really small and low quality?” Well advertising agency Dentsu have the answer..how about placing TWO small mobile screens together to create one slighly larger low quality movie!

The ‘technology’ behind this is called Pair Movie and was developed by Mobile Art Lab.

The way it works is that you sit next to the person you want to watch the movie with. Then you both head over to the same mobile Internet page where there will be two links, one for the left video and one for the right. You both hit the links at the same time to get each side streamed to create one long movie across two screens.

Check out the video explaining the campaign, it’s worth watching just to hear the voice-over. Some of the points they make are quite comical. How does putting two phones together make mobile videos less degraded?

The music video was made into a series of five 90-second drama shows which could be streamed for free from the campaign site. You can view them here.

The Pair Movie site doesn’t say if any other technology is used to ensure both videos play exactly at the same time. At first I thought it might use Infra-red but then I saw that phones could be placed vertically or horizontally so that would rule it out. So if I have a slow connection and you have fast one, what happens to the experience if they play out of sync?

It received some really good results, the Pair Movie was played 320,000 times in the first month. The total number of downloads is now 2,200,000 and still growing. More than 150,000 copies of the song were sold and the song Sunao Ni Naretara became JuJu’s biggest hit.

This campaign recently won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival

Check out some of these handsets that are being launched by Japan telecomms company Softbank. All handsets are made by Sharp.

Solar Hybrid 936SH

The ‘Solar Hybrid’ is by far the most impressive handset. It gives you 1 minute call time for every 10 minutes charged by the sun as well as a UV rating in case you don’t want to get burnt. Amazingly it’s also waterproof withstanding being immersed in 1 meter of water for 30 minutes.

The Premium Waterproof 935SH

Like the name suggests, this handset can’t be penetrated by rainwater and comes with a PX5 and IPX7 rating for water resistance. Oh and they’ve thrown in a 8MP camera on the back too.

Aquos Shot 933SH

This one looks more like a digital camera than a phone. It comes with a 10MP camera with low-noise CCD sensor which makes it much easier to get great pictures.