Traces of the RS520’s Koreanness surfaced occasionally. Tap on the RosePodcast icon and then on Genres, and you get a screenful of Hangul characters (the Korean alphabet). RoseFM attempts to pull in Korean stations as the factory default, although changing that to the US or another country is trivial. One of the icons on the display is for launching Bugs, an unfortunately named pay-to-play Asian streaming service headquartered in South Korea. Tapping the icon results in a message that says “It is not a service area.”
Ah, language quirks. At times, the HiFi Rose RS520 reminded me of the Russian translator in the movie Tetris, who tries out her best English on an American businessman in Moscow. “Do you require succor?” she chirps, offering her assistance. “Esteemed to meet you!” We know what she means even if the choice of words isn’t impeccable.
Because HiFi Rose is an engineering-centric company (footnote 8), niceties like translation and spelling sometimes seem to get short shrift. On the RS520, linguistic quirks were never particularly enigmatic, but perfection is a ways off. When connecting to Bluetooth, the message you get is the slightly off-kilter “Execute [Bluetooth] to search for available devices.” The screen that lets you choose among three font sizes for streaming music says, by way of instruction, “Enlarge a Playback information.” Even the company’s official English-language website (footnote 9) states, “Before the sudden change, the tool until yesterday is meaningless.” Jon Derda says HiFi Rose has been “making small changes with each iteration of [the RS520’s] firmware (footnote 10), to Americanize the product further.”