Released as a mas­cot and spe­cial bonus fea­ture to the Japan­ese Win­dows 7 Ulti­mate edi­tion, Nanami Madobe quickly gains fame in the otaku com­mu­nity as the lat­est and most adorable of the OS-tans. Wide­spread pop­u­lar­ity was then estab­lished when the cel­e­brated seiyuu (voice actress) and singer Nana Mizuki was hired to serve as the voice of Nanami-tan. As one might guess, the name Nanami is a word­play on the seiyuu’s name and the Japan­ese proun­ci­a­tion of seven (“nana”).

Only in Japan…

What­ever else one might say about Microsoft as a com­pany, you got to admit that their Japan­ese branch sure has awe­some mar­ket­ing ideas. I can’t pro­vide fac­tual sources here, but I’m sure will­ing to bet that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the Japanese’s younger techie com­mu­nity — those most picky about their oper­at­ing sys­tem choices — are at least mod­er­ated involved in the Japan­ese visual cul­ture, bet­ter known as their anime/manga otaku cul­ture. Mak­ing Win­dows 100% more moé is cer­tainly one sure­fire way of mak­ing sure at least one of their machines, likely the most often used one, is run­ning it.

A com­par­i­son of pros and cons seems unnec­es­sary as this is strictly opin­ion based, but the fol­low­ing seems obligatory:

Pos­si­ble side-effects of admit­ting Nanami-tan into party:

• You may start per­son­al­iz­ing your com­puter and develop attrac­tion towards it.
• You may feel sud­den, intense urges to watch a Nana-voiced series, par­tic­u­larly Mahou Shoujo Lyri­cal Nanoha.
• Ono­matopoeia for sound effects may dis­tract men­tal con­cen­tra­tion on inten­sive tasks (e.g. writ­ing, programming).
• Peo­ple within vicin­ity may give you strange stares while com­puter is in use.
• Cute-sified noises may emanate dur­ing the most inap­pro­pri­ate times, such as when con­vers­ing with a sig­nif­i­cant other and lead­ing to accu­sa­tions of infidelity.
• Asso­ciates may suspect/accuse you of being a lolicon/pedophile.
• You may actu­ally begin to like Microsoft prod­ucts (shock!)

Delux pack­ag­ing set for her true goshujin-sama…

This review comes in late as I had to give it some time to fairly access my liv­ing expe­ri­ences with Nanami-tan.

As a pre­built theme pack, Nanami is com­pletely hassle-free to install. Sim­ply drag the dou­ble click on the file while in a Win­dows 7 envi­ron­ment and it will be auto­mat­i­cally loaded to your per­son­al­ized set­tings. Once set, the first thing you’ll hear is “Kon­nichiwa~! Nanami-desu~!” as your new OS-tan intro­duces her­self. You’ll also notice that sev­eral new images should have been loaded into your desk­top back­ground rotater. The next is prob­a­bly when Nana-tan start mak­ing ran­dom sounds.

Here’s a pre­view of the Nanami sounds:

Fans of the Nanoha series will notice imme­di­ately that Nanami sounds exactly like Fate Tes­tarossa Har­laown. Nana Mizuki has also voiced numer­ous other char­ac­ters that sound sim­i­lar, but Fate is by far the clos­est in my opin­ion. Hence, amongst the rec­om­men­da­tions for wall­pa­per pack replace­ments include all the images from Fate’s mas­sive fan­base.

Make no mis­take, as Nanami makes a lot of noises, replac­ing vir­tu­ally every sin­gle sound effect (and more) in the nor­mal Win­dows 7 with a short phrase or an ono­matopoeia. She’ll greet “okaeri~!” (wel­come back) as you log on, give her farewell as you log off, say “pipo~” when you min­i­mize a win­dow and “ja-jan~!” when you restore it. She’ll even announce sys­tem error ver­bally with an uncer­tain tone, bring­ing you few cute words of peace and calm in a sit­u­a­tion where one is more likely to pan­ick as some­thing very bad has just happened.

Although, as often as her “pipo~”/“ja-jan~!” lines might be trig­gered, they still don’t com­pare to her com­pletely ran­dom “chin~!” sounds. As far as I can tell, these are com­pletely ran­dom­ized, although some­times they may be trig­gered repeat­edly dur­ing the midst of heavy pro­cess­ing activ­ity. This is also the sound most likely to emerge dur­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate moment, although to up now I’ve found it mostly amus­ing when she goes ‘chin~!’ in the midst of explo­sions, machine-gun bursts, screams and shouts in the midst of a Com­pany of Heroes game. How­ever, if it becomes too much like it does for most peo­ple, it can be eas­ily turned off by right click­ing the desk­top -> per­son­al­ize -> sounds.

Down­load

You can fetch the Namami theme pack at Megau­pload, or at this not sketchy at all image­board (page SFW, site prob­a­bly not) which also con­tains the Nanami taskbar sitter.

The web has made her more colorful~!

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Rail­gun intro­duces new Macindows-OS
• Japan Crushes my Soul

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 15:24 and is filed under Fandom General, Technobabble. 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.