This service is skinned another way in the Chat app, which presents a two-way conversation system, with your language on one side and your partner’s language on the other, upside-down. There’s no button-pressing in this setup: Each speaker simply talks into a microphone on either side of the handheld, and a translation is both played and displayed in text on their side of the screen. It’s the same concept as the one-click translation, but more hands-free.
The other major feature is a photo-based translation app, which works exactly as you think it should by snapping a picture of text in a foreign language. The unit supports 40 languages, many with multiple dialects, and boasts support for “93+ accents.” Any of those languages can be translated into any other if you’re online, either via Wi-Fi or connected via a cellular network.
But the killer feature of the T1 is that you can download offline language packs, which lean on the unit’s AI-powered CPU to translate text when you’re not connected. The device supports 31 offline language pairs, but note that’s not the same as 31 languages. Korean-to-Thai translation is supported, as is Korean-to-Russian, but you can’t translate Thai to Russian unless you’re online. For English, only 10 language pairs are supported, and each combination you wish to use must be downloaded to the device in advance, when you do have a connection.
Photograph: Chris Null
Translations are fast—if not quite completed in the 0.2 seconds that Timekettle claims—and accuracy was as good as any standard translator I tested it against. It was a more intuitive way to translate audio than using Google Translate (et al.) on a smartphone, though the Google method seems to be well understood globally these days, mitigating that advantage.
I didn’t notice any real difference in quality or speed between online and offline translations across a range of language tests, and many of my text-based translations turned in identical results (perhaps suspiciously so) to what I got with Google Translate. Voiced translations aren’t perfect, as they never are with these devices, but they roughly met the 90 percent accuracy that Timekettle promises. Make sure to run an operating system update (you won’t be prompted to do so; the option is buried in the “Settings” menu) to make the handoff between offline and online modes more seamless.
Screen Woes
The only major downside of the device is the screen, which has a sad 540 x 1080-pixel resolution, making it difficult to capture much with the 8-megapixel camera to translate at one time. While I can easily photograph a full screen of text with my cell phone for translation, the T1 was able to parse out only a few lines at a time due to its limited resolution. When I zoomed out, the results were usually wildly inaccurate or wholly illegible. Getting closer to the text was ultimately required to get a proper translation with the T1’s camera.
Photograph: Chris Mull