Phones 4 U and U and U
and some blurb about Summly
TF has been a bit quiet in the ‘pouring lukewarm scorn on tech innovation’ stakes. Stuff’s been happening but stuff’s always happening. We just developed soul-sapping ennui when confronted with the current crop of stuff.
Phoney
The Sony Xperia Z wows the judges on Splash!
Sony launched a new smartphone, the Xperia Z, which has a 5-inch screen (that’s big, for a phone). The tech munchkins at T3 (who may or may not be in receipt of certain quantities of Sony’s advertising spend) eulogised about the hand-set and Sony used their fawning hyperbole in many of its print ads. Any smartphone that’s not an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy is a hard sell these days so we wish Sony our very best. They might need it, a SIM-free Z costs over £500. A few weeks later Samsung launched the Galaxy S4 which also has a 5-inch screen and a few noodly features such as users being able to use eye movement to make videos pause. Gimmickry perhaps but bloggers and tech journos need something to write about. Samsung’s biggest test will come when they stop using Android and move to a proprietary operating system. They sort-of have to do this because Google (which created Android – oh, alright, they bought the blokes who created Android so it’s theirs now) will likely take longer to allow thirds parties (such as Samsung) dibs on new versions of Android after they’ve been installed in Google’s own-branded hand-sets such as the relatively new and relatively cheap and ever-so-clever Nexus 4 which was made for them by LG. Given that Google bought Motorola’s smartphone manufacturing arm in May 2012 it makes you wonder how long it’s going to take them to make a smartphone that’s actually theirs. It must be somewhat galling for the Googleplex engineering minions to not have complete control over their software spawn.
And Sony launched a new PlayStation although they didn’t actually show the device just what it can do – play games and such. Gosh! Very odd strategy that served to alienate the tech media even more than before.
And then we get to…
Summly
What Summly used to look like
Summly is an app for your smartphone that, if we’ve read the reports correctly, sends news to your phone in the form of abbreviated bullet-points. It sounds like a stream of headlines from which users can then decide what to read in depth. Not unlike reading a newspaper, then. The whizz who created Summly, Nick D’Aloisio is from Wimbledon. He is 17. He’s just sold his app to Yahoo for £20 million. While TF waits for the bleach to do its work counteracting the green tinge to our complexion, we thought we’d have a look at Summly and see what all the fuss is about. Because we’re fundamentally miserable gits we were hoping it would be a tech version of the apocryphal tale from the world of footie in the 80s when glowing reports from Watford FC reached AC Milan who dispatched agents to Hertfordshire to buy, ‘the big black bloke who plays up front,’ (or words to that effect) only to return with Luther Blissett and not the intended target John Barnes. Could Yahoo have ‘done a Blissett?’ Quite possibly.
First impressions are not good. User reviews give Summly an aggregate of just one star out of a possible five. The main reason for this is you need a Facebook or twitter ID to sign in and access any content. For the few users (all 18 of them) who’d left a review at the App Store the next biggest complaint was that the standard of material and quality of photos was shite. You can’t set any preferences, either, so you’re stuck with whatever the app decides to show you. Yes, you can search but TF doesn’t want to search for news, we’re not clairvoyant. And we couldn’t enlarge the page either. “Did Yahoo really pay £18 million for this?” posted a gob-smacked Monnom56. No, they paid £20 million, the nutters. It’s all a bit confusing for the likes of TF because keying ‘Summly’ into the App Store search box gets you an iPhone app called Clipped. Is this even the same thing? And there seems to be no iPad version, which is insane. And there’s nowt in the Android Market. All very odd.
We have a vague sense of déjà vu with regards to Summly in that we’re sure we heard about it some time ago, thought ‘BFD’ and moved on to the next mouthful of bacon butty. If all this seems true to the TF ethos of maximum snark that’s purely coincidental. We had no ideas or opinions about Summly before we started noodling around to write this. We speak as we find and the word is ‘cock’. Kudos to Master Nick, though, the spawny wee get.
Postscript…
Even more confused now. Click on the link that appears in the profile on the Summly Twitter page and you’re directed to iTunes and then nowhere because a message pops up saying the app is not available in either the UK or US iTunes store. Further digging at summly.com finally sheds some light. To quote Master Nick: “Most importantly, thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products – see this as a ‘power nap’ so to speak.”
So there we have it. Mystery solved. The bollocks people are now downloading from the App Store is not Summly. We were mean, other daft nobs were mean and it was all because we were talking drivel on account of letting our fat gobs off the leash before we’d taken the time to have a good scout around. Having said that it would have been polite of the App Store to have had a message pop up when anyone tried to download the Summly app telling them they couldn’t and maybe explaining why. Just a thought.
PPS – TF realises that, if you’re tech-savvy in a social media sense, there will be much tutting and eye-rolling regarding all the guff in the Summly paragraph above. Fogies are easily confused and tend to bestow trust where it doesn’t belong, not least in their own cognitive powers. In addition to downloading the wrong (and crap) app, we also managed to acquire a book by David Ryan called Stop! The timing of the transaction was weird – neither we nor Mrs Fogey were online downloading books from iTunes at that time. I suspected a conspiracy by ne’er-do-wells taking advantage of befuddled fogies whose curiosity about Summly had resulted in them being saddled not only with a crap app but also a nefarious book purchase.
Mounting our highest available horse we fired off a righteous rant to iTunes customer service. Jason (a real person, imagine!) at the other end probably did a bit of tutting and eye-rolling of his own and refunded the cost of the mysterious book and was calming and conciliatory even though, as it turns out, he needn’t have been. Because in spite of being asked directly whether she’d bought Stop! by David Ryan, Mrs Fogey’s powers of recollection drew a complete blank. It transpired that she had bought it. It’s a book by an ex-police dog-handler about stopping your dog running after horses/runners/deer/cyclists/cars etc. We need it because the Fogey Mutt would happily spend her life chasing down every moving thing in Richmond Park until she got kicked to death or run over to death.
So all’s well that ends well. Or something. And Nick d’Aloisio is still very wealthy and very young. And we’re still hopeless, hapless Fogies.
