Alright, since no one’s going to give first impressions of using a Marc Newson Talby Phone, I will. First off, my Japanese ability is that of a 3rd grader. That being said, the Talby uses a LOT of kanji in the menu system. I’ve seen several Japanese phones which were Japanese only, and these phones used more katakana and hiragana than kanji, making it a little more reasonable to figure out. So far, I’ve been able to choose the ring tones and access the phone book, but that’s about as far as I can go. I was surprised with the lights, I chose the black button model, thinking the lights might light up white, but they illuminate orange! Orange being one of my favorite colors(I sound like a nerd), I was totally pleased. The screen is beautiful, high resolution and full of color. The sound quality is nice as well. It came with several nice preinstalled tunes along with one partial “Chaku-uta,” song, “Free.” “Chaku-uta,” sounds like some kind of cave-man term. The tiny speaker puts out decent audio, but it’s really nothing spectacular. The placement of the buttons is a little awkward. It’s freezing in Tokyo right now, so maybe the fact that all of my fingers are numb doesn’t help. The numerical keypad is alright, though I can see times when heavy text messaging might require a second hand to hold the device as I type. The menu buttons are tiny and close to the screen. I also tried the camera out and it’s not much better than the camera on my 1 year old Vodafone Toshiba. It’s still fun to have though, crappy cameras are always fun. Also, it’s very light-weight, it barely feels like you’re holding anything. Anyway, that’s what I’ve got so far, it’s an awesome phone, but if you don’t know any Japanese, it might be frustrating.

*update*
I got a little further with the menu system, it didn’t take long. There are only two screensavers, one is a weird sea-ray spaceship thing which flies by, not too exciting. The other is a kaleidoscope, which is a bit more psychedelic and vibrant. I actually prefer the screensaver on the previous Infobar phones which displayed moving bars of color. It took a little longer to figure out how to register my new email address. There’s only one animation when receiving mail, I can’t figure out how to choose another one. So far a cow races towards the screen with an envelope in it’s mouth. I saw another one when I first opened it, I got a welcome email from AU, and the animation showed line-art rockets flying by. This is a great phone, I’ve made a few calls already and they were fairly clear, much better than my old phone(I shouldn’t say old, 1 year was not long ago). Phones get outdated pretty quick in Japan though, there’s an entirely new line-up every two-three months, so things move fast.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Japanese products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.