Review: Eurovision: The People's Panel
Score:
35%
Eurovision is nearly here, and everyone is asking who is going to win (my money, literally, is on Iceland by the way). Marvellous have a polling application, The People's Panel, which is going to try and answer that. Unfortunately, the public are just as fickle on their smartphone as they are on voting in the Song Contest itself.
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A fast user interface in an application as time-sensitive as this is a must, and while the screen reacts well, the layout of the screens and information leaves a lot to be desired. When I opened this and saw Austria (running second) I thought I had missed Dino Merlin's appearance for Bosnia & Herzegovina. Sorting the songs in alphabetical order is okay, I suppose, but we have known the running order since March, so it would have been nice to sort that before then, because Austria at the top of the list (running second) forced me to stop and think.
Anyway, onwards into the contest and time to rate the songs. It's a simple matter of tapping the country, and you'll be presented with the traditional 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 or a single point to tap on. This is sent up to Marvellous (the developer), who are tabulating all of the votes and presenting them to you.
It's a nice bit of fun, but the final result of Semi Final two on the panel putting Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Cyprus and Belgium in the top ten to qualify gave it a failure rate of 50%. With ten from nineteen going through that's slightly worse than a 50% failure rate. For the first semi final, six correct results from ten. Better, but still not close enough for me.
Naturally, it's all a bit of fun, but if you can poll enough people, you can get a very accurate result, at least for the public vote - Google's Eurovision Predictor manages to get the winner every year, and has a proven track record to fall back on. So while this is a bit of fun (which it clearly says on the splash screen), I am wondering why the results are are so far out.
I suspect that this is down to having little security to stop multiple voting, and it's unlikely that it takes into consideration the location of the user (to replicate the voting structure of Eurovision). Add to that you can vote more than once for a country on your handset, with no indications if you've voted twice or if your old vote is overwritten.
I like my fun to have a bit of honesty behind it, and right now, the Eurovision People's Panel is just too light and fluffy for my tastes. It's not even winning points as a handy reference for the running order on Saturday.
Which is a shame, we need a nice Eurovision app on Symbian (cough) and unfortunately this isn't it. While it's not nul points, it's very much a "make-do" song that Portugal would send.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at