Author: Duncan Pike

On the heels of its X300 series launch, Vivo has officially announced that OriginOS 6, its take on Android 16, will be shipping to global markets. The new X300 devices support the updated OS out of the box, but it will roll out to older devices in the coming months. Before you get too excited, the new OS probably won’t ship to every Vivo device. It’s more likely that only upper mid-range and flagship devices will be eligible for the update, like the pricey X200 Pro launched at the start of this year. Still, it’s a welcome change from the outdated…

Vivo announced its new X300 series flagship smartphones last night at its debut launch event in Shanghai, China. The Vivo X300 and X300 Pro follow on from the X200 Ultra launched earlier in the year. While the latter device skipped the South African market, the incoming X300 series seems to bridge the gap that typically exists between pro- and ultra-level devices, so much so that it’s hard to tell where the soon-to-follow X300 Ultra will fit in. Vivo X300 wants to snap your pics Like the X200 series it succeeds, the X300 puts camera performance front and centre. Both the…

Remember back in January when Netflix said it would roll out party and couch co-op games on your TV ‘in the future’? Well, that future is finally here, kinda. The streaming giant’s co-CEO, Gregory Peters, has announced what the first of those titles will be and that they’re coming for the holiday season during the recent Bloomberg Screentime conference. “We’re creating a completely new way to play games — one that’s as easy as streaming a show on a Friday night,” said Netflix in its announcement post. You’ll need a Netflix sub, and some friends There will be five party games…

It’s been a minute since Sennheiser has competed in the high-end wireless headphone space. It launched the Momentum 4 in 2022, which is still favoured by some over the likes of Sony and Apple, but it’s been real quiet since. Now, instead of the Momentum 5 follow-up, the company recently announced the HDB 630. The HDB 630 doesn’t hold anything back You’d be forgiven for thinking the new HDB 630 were part of the Momentum range. In a way, they are. Sennheiser says they “inherited” much of their design from the Momentum 4 but that they’ve got a new acoustic…

You can already get it on your smartphone and your computer, and now Fraimic aims to let you put AI-generated art on your wall with what it calls “the world’s smartest art canvas.” The company behind the new E Ink canvas is currently running a rather successful campaign on Kickstarter, raising over $800,000 since it launched in September. The idea is simple: tell your canvas what art you want to see, and it will generate it for you. It’s powered by OpenAI, so you probably don’t have to worry about pesky things like copyright. More AI slop please, Fraimic Using…

Dedicated AI-powered devices can be a mixed bag. That’s a fact that OpenAI and former Apple design head Jony Ive are contending with as the pair attempt to justify OpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of io, when the latter has yet to release a single product. OpenAI and Ive are facing developmental issues as they try to bring a supposedly always-on AI-powered device to market, the Financial Times (FT) reported. No repeating Humane and Rabbit Inc.’s mistakes The initial plan centred around creating a screenless, smartphone-sized device that would use microphones and cameras to take audio and visual cues from the user’s environment.…

Earlier this month, Dell Technologies announced what it calls the Dell Pro Plus Earbuds, and they’re exactly what you think they are. Like most regular earbuds these days, the Dell Pro Plus earbuds offer active noise cancellation, transparency mode, and adaptive audio. But they have a trick up their sleeve — these are the world’s first earbuds to ship with a Microsoft Teams Open Office certification. It’s mostly the same thing as a regular Microsoft Teams certification, only with more stringent testing involved. They’re also certified for Zoom. Dell Pro Plus Earbuds for work The Dell Pro Plus Earbuds support…

If you’re the type who can’t help but violently roll your eyes at the mere mention of AI, you’d better hold on to those balls of jelly — Perplexity has made its purpose-built AI browser, ‘Comet’, available to everyone for free. From its release in July this year, the browser was only available to macOS users of Perplexity’s Max subscription for $200/m (~R3,450/m). Now, thankfully, Perplexity has made it free for everyone, including Windows users. Perplexity shoots its Comet at everyone If you aren’t one of the macOS-using Perplexity Max subscribers who got to try it out first, or don’t…

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are your family’s tech support. If you bear the weight of that roll, we salute you. We also thought we should give you and people like you a heads up that Microsoft has finally unveiled new icons for its Office apps for the first time since 2018. They might look slightly familiar if you were paying attention when they leaked earlier this year, but now they’re official, heading to a PC near you, and will probably cause at least a little confusion for folks not permanently plugged into the internet. New…

Apple is said to be prioritising work on its smart glasses at the cost of progress towards a lighter, cheaper version of the Vision Pro, according to a Bloomberg report from the usually-correct Mark Gurman. The Cupertino-based company is apparently working on “at least two” models of smart glasses, including one version with a built-in display and one without. The displayless model could be announced as soon as next year and launched in 2027. The version featuring a display was originally planned for 2028, but the Big Fruit Company is looking to speed things up before Meta Platforms eats the…