Rain’s (not) the One
Rain, a latecomer to South Africa’s mobile network operator game, is hiking its prices. That’s not déjà vu, either. Despite already bumping up its prices in June, the operator is putting its customer’s patience to the test, this time only targeting its RainOne packages, which initially launched in May 2023 with a starting price of R560/m.
That was the case until 1 June 2024, when Rain sprung a R36 increase on customers, leaving them with a R595/m bill for the base RainOne package, offering 30Mbps speed. A further R200/m investment unlocks 60Mbps speeds, while the highest tier includes 100Mbps+ speeds for an extra R400/m.
The most recent hike, which took effect from 01 September 2024, sticks RainOne Home on the wrong side of R600 – sending the base package’s price up to R625/m, a not-so-minor R30/m increase. The same rules still apply to those customers looking to boost their speeds up to 60Mbps and 100Mbps+, meaning their new prices will be R825/m and R1,025/m respectively. Hey, at least you’re getting a pretty router, right?
The hike comes soon after Rain launched its own 4G mobile network – the spectrum of which it acquired back in 2022, officially marking the company South Africa’s fourth telco after the fall of Cell-C, which now relies on MTN for a “virtual radio access network” and Vodacom for a national roaming agreement.
Anker’s new 100W Nano Charger is smaller, lighter than ever
If you’re the sort to watch every gram in your luggage (yeah, you and the Columbian drug lords), you’re probably constantly upgrading the tech that travels with you. If that’s the case, you’re probably using one of the new gallium nitride (GaN) chargers that are all the rage. If you’ve replaced all of your chargers with a single one, it’s probably Anker’s 100W Nano Charger.
If that’s the case, you should know that there’s a new one inbound. It’s smaller and lighter than the previous model. That’s part of its appeal – a 30% size reduction and a drop in weight to just 120 grams. We’ve had chocolate bars that weighed more.
Of course, there’s a compromise to be made but if your tech is sufficiently modern, it won’t matter. Anker has reduced the port layout to a single USB-C. With the right cable, you can charge your tablet, notebook, smartphone, and anything else rocking the C. And, of course, the design change absolves you from bringing more than a single cable on your trip. Every gram counts, right, Pablo?
It’s up for pre-order now, but a South African release will likely take some time. We’ll keep you updated.
Honor reaffirms on-device AI deepfake detection
Last Friday as part of a panel discussion focussing on AI at IFA 2024, Honor CEO George Zhao reaffirmed Honor’s commitment to combating fraud that uses AI-generated deepfake videos with a feature called AI Deepfake Detection. Honor first announced the feature in June at MWC Shanghai 2024 during its keynote address. It has now expanded on how the feature will work and when we can expect to see it in action.
“To help prevent fraud and detect digitally manipulated content, AI Deepfake Detection examines frame-by-frame information such as eye contact, lighting, image clarity, and video playback to identify flaws that are imperceptible to the human eyes,” says Honor.
Honor trained its deepfake detection model on a “large dataset of videos and images related to online scams”. This will supposedly enable the feature to identify, screen, and compare samples “within three seconds”. When it detects AI-generated content, a risk warning is presented to the user. You can see an example of it in action here.
As useful as this feature sounds, we’ll need to wait a little longer before it shows up on local Honor devices. During Honor’s keynote address at IFA 2024, Zhao said Honor’s AI Deepfake Detection feature would be available on the Honor Magic 7. Seeing as the Magic 6 Pro launched here in March this year, chances are high that Honor will stick to the same period for its next launch.
Astro Bot DLC news has cured our depression
As we, and just about everyone else in the world have already said, we want more Astro Bot. No. We need more Astro Bot. Considering that the game is still riding the high of its spectacular launch on Friday, we don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. But more content might be on the way sooner than you might think.
Those who have played the credits (yes, played the credits) might have noticed Team Asobi listing certain franchises that never wriggled their way into the game in the first place. Those include first- and third-party titles like Rise of the Ronin, Assassin’s Creed, Stellar Blade, Worms, Rayman, Beyond Good & Evil and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. We won’t pretend we noticed. Thank God for r/GamingLeaksAndRumours.
Team Asobi has already made clear their intentions to eventually drop some post-game content for Astro Bot, giving the speedrunner community something else to froth over for a minute, whenever that happens. But there might just be more to the story. If Team Asobi intends to put those franchises in one way or another, we can only imagine it would take the form of new worlds to explore and bots to rescue.
A DLC of this stature, at the very least, would put our complaints about the game’s too-short campaign to bed, spanning roughly just over nine hours.
