Review: Toozla
Score:
55%
While it won't replace local knowledge and a friendly face, Toozla's audio guide to the world around you is a great little tool to have in your pocket while you travel, or even if you want to explore your home town and discover something about where you live. But it has some very rough edges - which might be enough to stop many people using it.
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Sitting here in Edinburgh and starting Toozla, the app works out where I am with the usual mix of GPS and network positioning, and provides me with a map of the local area that has some pins scattered around it on points of interest. The church just round the corner from my house is marked up so let's start there. Oh, I can't, I'm being prompted to "Come close to listen" to the description. The same goes, amazingly, for a green marker that the pop up dialog calls the "Weather Forecast". I need to come close to that as well before I get to hear it.
Straight away I have a problem with this approach - it assumes that I don't want to do any planning of my day, and I want to leave it all down to serendipity as I walk around a city, handing me the audio only when I am within 50 meters of the location. That's not really me. The first use case presented to me by Toozla's Symbian application feels flawed and that's not a good sign.
Sitting alongside the "what's near you" experience of Toozla is the 'streams' experience. These are grouped audio clips that tell the story of a location from all the audio clips that are in an area. That story could be of the tourist sites and sounds, the local weather, or the user generated content created around where you are standing.
While some of the audio notes are original vocals, the majority that I came across were entries adapted from Wikipedia and passed through a text to speech engine. Now these have come on leaps and bounds, but it still sounds a little bit, well, like a computer. The information is there, but there's no passion for what's being described. It solves the problem of how to fill up a new ecosystem with content, but it feels just as empty, at least to me.
Yes, it's possible for other users to leave their own voice notes around the world and for you to come across them. Unfortunately, there's no sign of it in the Symbian application, even though it's heavily trailed on the website.
Toozla is addressing a problem that is out there - what's interesting around me - but it all feels a bit half hearted in this implementation on the Symbian platform. There's no way to explore without physically exploring yourself, and when you do, you are reliant on someone interesting having left a note there within the last month (which, given the number of users, spread over the world, is going to be a long shot for a while), or resigning yourself to hearing about the location via Wikipedia.
If I'm honest, I'd rather read the mobile version of Wikipedia on my smartphone, but I appreciate that others may prefer another way. Perhaps Toozla is that for you, it's a free download so there's little harm in trying it out. But I'll pass.
-- Ewan Spence, Oct 2011.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at