Samsung announced this week that two more health features are now available on its Galaxy Watch range in South Africa via the Samsung Health Monitor app – irregular heart rhythm and sleep apnea detection. The free software update, which went live on 13 January 2025, should already be available to South Africans who own a Galaxy Watch Ultra, Watch 7, Watch 6 Classic, and Watch FE at first. Samsung says the features will make their way to older devices “in the near future.” Samsung joins the heart health party If you’re not familiar with irregular heart rhythms, also known as…
Author: Duncan Pike
Have you ever been so good at something that no amount of further training will garner better results? That’s known as the ‘ceiling effect’ and could soon be a thing of the past – specifically for pianists and only if this robotic exoskeletal hand becomes more than a science experiment. Giving pianists a robotic exoskeletal hand A team of roboticists at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc. and the NeuroPiano Institute in Kyoto, Japan published a study last month in Science Robotics after they fitted a robotic exoskeletal hand to the finger-bearing flesh pads of 118 trained pianists. “For trained individuals…
Acer announced the launch of two new Predator gaming laptops last Friday at the prestigious IEM Katowice Counter-Strike 2 tournament in Poland. Acer, being a headline sponsor of the event, unveiled the pair of high-specced machines to an arena of eager esports fans. Both the Predator Helios Neo 16 AI and 18 AI laptops come with the latest chips from Intel and Nvidia, up to a Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU. Additionally, both laptops support up to 64GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity internally, while offering a host of…
If you’re the type who likes to travel light, whether that be on holiday or to the office, you’re probably aware that if you’re taking a laptop with you it is likely to be the heaviest thing in your bag. That seems to be Asus’ entire focus with the new Zenbook A14. At 980g it is one of the lightest laptops we’ve reviewed, coming in under the 1kg weight of the Zenbook S 13 from 2023 while being nearly 50% thicker and a whole inch larger. Is that enough to justify its R30,000 price? Well, no, not on its own.…
Sooner or later the default router your ISP gave, sold, or loaned to you isn’t going to cut it. Maybe that’s because your ISP upgraded your line’s speed and you want to take advantage of less buffering and faster downloads. Maybe there’s a specific setting or feature you need that the standard router doesn’t offer. Or it could simply be that you need more coverage. After living with it for the better part of four months, we were a little surprised to learn that the three-pack Cudy M1300 mesh kit comes in at under R2,000. At that price, you can’t…
At a launch event in Johannesburg last night, Huawei officially unveiled two new mid-range smartphones in the nova 13 series along with a new MatePad 11.5 tablet. All three new devices are already available on the Huawei online store, with the nova 13 smartphones requiring a small deposit while the MatePad tablet can be bought outright. In classic Huawei style, it has chosen to focus on the design and camera capabilities of the nova 13. It features a material-like plaid texture on the rear of the green colourway, although there is also a plain black option if you’re not into…
We’re sure there are folks out there… somewhere… who relish the thought of cleaning their homes. Likewise, we know that most people don’t. The Xiaomi X20+ robot vacuum is for both types of people. If you’re the second kind, like us, having this thing zooming around your house will considerably cut down the time you spend on cleaning. If you’re in the first group, then owning the Xiaomi X20+ means you might not get to clean quite as often but can still pay special attention to those areas in need of a deep clean. Farewell, dirt Making the dirt disappear…
It’s a new year so that means we get new stuff. Asus has wasted no time in bringing the Zenbook A14 to the South African market. Sporting a Snapdragon X Elite chipset and weighing in at 980g, Asus claims this is the “lightest 14-inch Copilot+ PC on the market.” The company has achieved this through the use of what it calls Ceraluminum, “a sumptuously tactile material that’s 30% lighter and three times stronger than anodized aluminium.” We’ve seen previous Asus laptops made with this material, like the Zenbook S13. That too was rather light but the A14 takes the cake…
Earlier this week, Google announced that it had released (most of) the source code for the first modern smartwatch – the Pebble. Google acquired Pebble and its intellectual property through its purchase of Fitbit but has now made PebbleOS open-source, meaning anyone is free to tinker with it. The person best suited to tinkering with PebbleOS, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, already has plans for the watch to make a comeback. Pebbles on your wrist We won’t blame you if the name isn’t that familiar, the company’s first product started out as a Kickstarter campaign in 2016 after four years in…
In an ideal world, we all have enough money to afford one monitor for work and a separate monitor for pleasure. Most folks don’t live in that world and have to prioritise one over the other. Or, they meet in the middle and get something like the MSI Pro MP341CQ. It is marketed as a productivity monitor but some of the specs that make it good for work transfer over to gaming, like an increased resolution and higher-than-average refresh rate. As is often the case, trying to be a jack of all trades can mean you end up as a…