Author: Duncan Pike

Smartphone shoppers in South Africa are spoiled for choice. Whether you’re upgrading your contract or buying for cash, there are plenty of options that cover a wide price range. Most devices lie within the lower two-thirds of the price spread, but Vivo’s X300 Pro is different. At its launch price of R40,000, the X300 Pro was one of the most expensive smartphones you could buy in South Africa. You might have heard a similar story when the company first brought its flagship X-series to the country with the X200 Pro in 2025. Since the X300 Pro launched, its price has…

Logitech G, the company’s gaming peripheral arm, recently announced a new crop of budget-friendly devices. The new (but still familiar) G305 X Superlight mouse and the G316 X 98 keyboard. The pair join the G325 and G321 gaming headsets that were announced earlier this year. New G305 mouse, same G305 shape It’s been a while since Logitech last updated the ever-popular G305. The previous ‘Lightspeed’ model is still available, but now it’ll see competition from the new G305 X Superlight. If Logitech is good at one thing, it’s making gaming gear. The second thing would be slapping an ‘X Superlight’…

There’s been all manner of tech coming out of China lately. If it isn’t phones with gigantic batteries, then it’s semi-affordable humanoid robots. The latest development involves Xiaomi and your electric vehicle. The company recently showed off a demonstration video of its latest cool thing — a robotic arm autonomously plugging in an electric vehicle to charge. When it’s done, it unplugs the charging gun and stows itself away, saving EV owners up to several seconds every day. Plug me in, Xiaomi This particular robot was designed specifically for this task, so you won’t catch it doing anything else. Xiaomi…

Today, BYD officially unveiled its latest plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, the Atto 2. It joins the ever-growing ranks of the compact SUV segment as the newest ‘cheapest plug-in hybrid’ in the country, beating out BYD’s own Sealion 5. The Atto 2 is built on BYD’s DM-i (Dual Mode-intelligent) hybrid technology platform and offers two derivatives for South African motorists to pick from: the cheaper Comfort model and the pricier Dynamic. They start at R450,000 and R490,000, respectively. Here’s what you’re getting for your money. Building its dream, one model at a time BYD is positioning the new Atto 2 between…

Having money to pay for stuff is cool, but not having to pay for stuff is even cooler. With the rising cost of video games, we’re confident most folks would agree that a free game is a good thing. It doesn’t matter if you don’t play much or have any interest in said game. There’s something about claiming a freebie that scratches a particular itch. You might not want to play it now, but that could change in the future. On the other hand, hearing you’ve missed out on claiming a freebie can sting, even though you haven’t really lost…

Meze Audio, the Romanian audio company responsible for iconic headphones like the 99 Classics and their 99 Neo sibling, has announced its latest flagship headphone — the ARTA. If you want your headphones to look as good as they sound, you’ll probably be interested in these… until you see the price. Meze describes them as “a passion project years in the making, born from the desire to push the limits of conventional headphone sound and design.” Sure, art is subjective, but we think it’s nailed the latter almost enough to warrant using words like “futuristic” and “bionic fluidity” to describe…

Audi has just announced the Nuvolari, its first hybrid supercar and successor to the iconic R8. It features a distinctive design language that R8 fans will spot from afar, and enough ‘F1-inspired’ technology that makes us question how the company managed to make it road-legal. That probably isn’t something you’ll have to worry about. Not that this will be too expensive (it will be), but that Audi is only making 499 of them, with deliveries starting next year. “With the Audi Nuvolari, we are accelerating technological progress,” says Gernot Döllner, Chairman of the Board of Management of AUDI AG. “It…

If you’ve been thinking we need more soundbar options, you’ll be pleased to know the folks at WiiM have obliged with the WiiM Bar. The company has positioned this soundbar, which it calls a “display-first” soundbar, as the solution for audiophiles who are also cinephiles, and vice versa. The company says it is “designed to bring powerful home theater sound, deep WiiM control, and at-a-glance playback visibility into one elegant living room device.” A WiiM away from great audio One thing that sets this soundbar apart from others is the 2.1in circular full-colour touch display in its centre. You can…

If you’re still using Office 2019 on your Apple devices, you should seriously think about jumping ship. From 13 July 2026, Microsoft’s apps in the Office 2019 for Mac package will enter what the company calls “reduced functionality mode” and lose the ability to create and edit documents. It also affects outdated apps on iPhone and iPad, but not the Windows version of Office 2019. End of life, time to pay Support for Microsoft’s one-time purchase Office 2019 for Mac officially ended in October 2023. However, the apps remained operational. Come 13 July, or in a little over 5 weeks,…

Nvidia kicked off Computex this week with its announcement of RTX Spark, a “superchip” built around the promise of improved on-device AI. Nvidia’s term, ‘superchip’, might be a bit of ambitious marketing, but the product is certainly more than just the company’s first CPU. RTX Spark consists of a 6,144-core Blackwell RTX graphics card (similar to an RTX 5070 desktop GPU), a 20-core Grace 3nm ARM CPU that it co-designed with MediaTek, and 128GB of unified LPDDR5X memory. As for its on-device AI abilities, Nvidia is throwing around a 1-petaflop performance figure for FP4 AI workloads. That tracks, on paper,…