Author: Duncan Pike

Late yesterday, Sonos unveiled its new flagship premium soundbar and refreshed subwoofer – the Arc Ultra and Sub 4. Sonos says it’s achieved a “significant breakthrough in audio engineering” with the Arc Ultra using what it calls ‘Sound Motion’. That’s the fancy-sounding name Sonos has given to its newly designed transducers that came with the company’s acquisition of Mayht two years ago. According to Sonos, the new tech “drastically reduces the size of the transducer while supercharging the bass.” That’s resulted in the Arc Ultra delivering “up to double the bass of its predecessor.” With all that bass, we’re wondering…

Dell Technologies and Moyo, a digital business consultancy based in South Africa, have teamed up to introduce South African potato farmers to an autonomous drone that uses AI to detect potato leaf disease with impressive accuracy. If you’re one of those farmers and thought South Africa’s agriculture sector could do with better crop health monitoring, that’s exactly what this solution promises to achieve. If you’re not a potato farmer, maybe read our review of the new iPhone 16 Pro instead, while the grown-ups put food on the shelves for you to buy. You know what SA needs more of? Drones,…

Internet Archive, the American nonprofit digital library and home of The Wayback Machine webpage archiving service, suffered a data breach late last month that has just come to light following a series of DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks that took the site down for several hours on Tuesday, 08 October, again the following Wednesday, and for a third time at the time of writing. The breach exposed the email addresses, usernames, and bcrypt password hashes of roughly 31 million users. Internet Archive under attack Site founder Brewster Kahle confirmed the DDoS attack on X.com and later provided updates after the site’s…

Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek today announced its latest flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9400. Built on TSMC’s 2nd generation 3nm process, the new system-on-a-chip (SoC) boasts notable improvements over last year’s Dimensity 9300. The best bits of the Dimensity 9400 Everything about the new Dimenisty 9400 is faster and more efficient, as expected from a new SoC. It uses a 1+3+4 cluster design, translating to one super fast performance core for single-thread applications, three slightly slower cores for multi-threaded workloads, and four efficiency cores for background tasks. For the super fast performance core, MediaTek is using a new Cortex-X925 CPU from…

Xiaomi South Africa officially announced that the Xiaomi 14T is now available in South Africa at a launch event held in Joburg last night. Unfortunately, no mention was made of the 14T Pro, so if you were hoping for that, tough luck. However, the upper mid-range 14T still features a respectable spec sheet, including a MediaTek Dimensity 8300-Ultra SoC and a particular focus on photography with some help from Leica. Sipping some Xiaomi 14T Earlier in the month, we speculated on this launch and it turns out that most of what we suspected regarding the phone’s specs came to fruition.…

Like it or not, the current wave of generative artificial intelligence is here to stay. Case in point, Microsoft Copilot. It started out as the web-based Bing Chat but has evolved into a deeply integrated part of Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system. That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you’d rather not have Microsoft’s Copilot peering at you from your taskbar or automatically opening when you didn’t call for it, there are ways to remove it. Here’s how to do just that. How to uninstall Copilot in Windows 11 On some Windows-based machines, it could be as easy…

In early 2022, Sony took a chance on a new type of wireless earbud. The LinkBuds were designed around an 11mm doughnut-shaped driver so the wearer could wear them all day while listening to whatever they wanted but remain connected to the outside world. As far as first-of-its-kind products go, they weren’t completely terrible. It wasn’t long before the LinkBuds S joined the family, just a few months later. Now, Sony’s bringing two more earbuds into the fold, as well as a new speaker. The LinkBuds family grows The LinkBuds Open are a direct sequel to the original LinkBuds. They…

Just as we were starting to think we’d seen the last premium-tier smartphone this year, an invite to the local launch for the Xiaomi 14T appeared in our inbox. It seems that Xiaomi decided it was as good a time as any to bring one of our favourite smartphone series back to SA. The last time we got our hands on a Xiaomi T-series device was the 11T back in 2021. It impressed us with its balance of affordability and performance, costing R14,000 at the time while sporting flagship-level specs like its Snapdragon 888 chipset, 120W charging, and respectable camera…

When Asus launched the ROG Ally, its first Windows-based handheld gaming console, last year, we liked the direction it was going. The new ROG Ally X  is not a proper sequel but more of a mid-cycle refresh, the likes of which we’ve seen with the Steam Deck OLED, Nintendo Switch OLED, and more recently the PS5 Pro. The ROG Ally X comes with a higher price tag, sure, but offers a decent slate of upgrades over the original that makes the decision of which handheld gaming console to get tricky – not to mention the arrival of the MSI Claw…

Comic Con Africa 2024 is officially underway from today, 26 September until Sunday, 29 September. While individual tickets for Saturday are already sold out, you can still grab a four-day pass for R700 which includes admission for Saturday, or stand-alone tickets for any of the other days at R200 a pop. But that’s just the price of entry, you’ll still need to fork out extra if you get hungry or if you want to buy any of the thousands of goodies on offer. That isn’t to say you can’t still make it worth your while. There are plenty of opportunities…