Fogey Friday
10th August
Hotmail, eBooks, Apple, YouTube
There was no Fogey Friday last week and this week’s is much diminished. There is tech news but who cares when the Olympics is on and you can watch women boxers beating seven bells of shit out of each other and various thrusting young types working up a sweat? If you have a gym membership and that gym has treadmills, here’s a little exercise you can try: Consider Alistair Brownlee, who won triathlon gold for Team GB. He ran a sub 30-minute 10k after having swum 1,500 metres and cycled 40km. So his average running speed was a shade over 20km per hour, nearly 12.5mph. Try it. Chances are your gym treadmill won’t go that fast and if it does you’ll be sprinting like a hungry cheetah. And then you will fall off. For the 50+ minutes duration of the cycling time trial, mod-man Bradley Wiggins averaged over 50kmh. That’s 31mph. In the velodrome sprinters such as Jason Kenny top 60kmh. The Olympics is a fiesta of such mind-boggling stats. So while Tech Fogey routinely has its gob-smacked by technological wizardry, this week we’re happy to let the human variety take centre stage. Hopefully there isn’t an app for that.
Book ‘em Danno
And so it came to pass – Amazon is now selling more digital ebooks downloads than the paper and ink alternative. For every 100 regular books sold so far this year, Amazon has spewed 114 digital screeds. And the tipping point, apparently, has been desperate housewives and their lust for smut. One of the oft-mentioned vagaries of eReaders such as Amazon’s Kindle is that no one can see what you’re reading. So your brow can be as high or low as it likes and the nation’s nosey-parkers will be none the wiser. Not a factor that featured in many long-term predictions for our digital future.
Outlook for Hotmail? Terminal.
Is your mail hot? Not for much longer. Microsoft has decided to ditch Hotmail, so anyone with an @hotmail.com account will need to replace it with @outlook.com. Hotmail will be redirected to Outlook once all users have established a new account, so no one should lose any communications. Hotmail (est. 1996) has 350 million users, while Google’s Gmail, which has been around only since 2007, has 425 million. Quite why Microsoft thinks the new name will make any difference to people’s email inclinations is anyone’s guess but here’s a thought: no one likes elements of their identity being changed without having any say-so in the matter. It might seem an exaggeration to include email addresses in this generalisation but we humans get attached to such apparent trivia. If the name of your street was randomly changed you might not like it but you wouldn’t go so far as to move house – that would be difficult, costly and mental. Moving email accounts, though, is very, very easy. Google must be laughing all the way to the bank (as usual) because there’s every chance that disgruntled Hotmailers will take umbrage and defect to Gmail, just because they can.
Apple Divests
In a long-term fit of pique, Apple is shunning all things Google. First it was Google Maps (dumped in favour of a fling with Tom Tom) and now YouTube (owned by Google) will no longer be a default app on Apple devices such as iPhone and iPad. You’ll still be able to get YouTube on your Apple device but you’ll have to download the app from the App Store, at least until the App Store decides not to stock the portal to the world’s third most visited website (Google and Facebook are 1 and 2). Steve Jobs was cross with the Googlers when they developed the Android operating system (OS) which is now in smartphones that far more punters are buying than his iPhone. Jobs got all stompy of foot because he didn’t like competition and thought Brin & Page had nicked all his OS-type ideas. So among his many legacies is Apple being committed to waging ‘thermonuclear war’ against Google. Nice.