Author: Duncan Pike

BMW and Toyota partner up to develop fuel cell cars Image: BMW BMW and Toyota’s long-term partnership will soon result in the pair’s first jointly-produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The plan is to launch them as soon as 2025. BMW already has a hydrogen-powered X5 concept in the pipeline with plans to start small-scale production this year. This isn’t the first time the pair have teamed up. You might’ve heard of the BMW Z4 or the Toyota Supra. The German-Japanese partnership developed both. BMW and Toyota are exploring another renewable energy source, as more manufacturers pivot towards electric vehicles.The main…

Nvidia, last week, announced its Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). This comprises “a collection of cloud-based AI models and services for developers to easily build, customize, and deploy engaging and interactive avatars.” It’s essentially a character creator for chatbots of the future. Remind us, how is this a good thing? Well, there are some excellent aspects to this. Mostly, the ones that don’t involve inserting digital avatars into your life unnecessarily. A startup could use Nvidia’s Omniverse ACE to create a sign language interpreter as an overlay for YouTube videos. Because Nvidia’s tech is cloud-based, the startup doesn’t need to…

A day after Samsung lifted the veil on its new folding flagship, the Galaxy Z Fold 4, Xiaomi announced its next foldable, the Xiaomi Mix Fold 2, at a launch event in China. This device looks like a considerable upgrade over the Mi Mix Fold from last year. It also looks like Xiaomi is playing the one-up game with Samsung in a few notable areas. For one, the Mix Fold 2 is several millimetres longer and wider than the Galaxy Z Fold 4. It’s nearly a millimetre thinner when unfolded and only measures 11.2mm thick when folded. That make’s it…

Here at Stuff, we get loads of cool tech to review. Sometimes it’s exciting and new. Sometimes it’s entirely novel. Often it’s functional and gets the job done. The Acer Veriton Z All-in-one (AIO) PC is one of the latter. But does it check the necessary boxes for those looking to populate a small to medium-sized business or who want a home office PC? Acer sent us one so we could find out. The point of putting it all together If AIO PCs are foreign to you, you can think of them like an iMac. The PC bits are all…

The South African Government is once again making changes to the national school curriculum. These will focus on bolstering the country’s output of mathematics, science, and technology students. New subjects, including robotics and coding, are being added to the curriculum with supporting equipment and software to boot. When asked how schools would be supported in this endeavour, education minister Angie Motshekga wrote in a parliamentary Q&A that the department plans to leverage existing STEM programs. The future is bright The Dinaledi Schools project, launched in 2005, is one such program. This was later combined with the Mathematics, Science and Technology…

Yet again, the leaks have been almost entirely accurate. Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 5 has been announced and it’s bringing a new Pro edition along for the ride. Today, at Samsung’s Unpacked event, the company revealed the variations of each device. If you guessed that they’re separated mostly by colour and whether they have LTE or not, well done you. Samsung’s been taking notes But that’s not the only difference. The vanilla Galaxy Watch 5 comes in 40mm and 44mm flavours while the Pro is only available in a 45mm size. Samsung has also opted to ditch the physical rotating…

Several leaks over the last few weeks have pointed to Samsung releasing its new Galaxy Fold 4 and Galaxy Flip 4 handsets this week. Early images of the devices suggested that nothing much has changed on the visual front. There were also concerns that hardware upgrades were more iterative than innovative. Well, it’s all official now and the leaks were spot on about the design bit, at the very least. The Fold 4 and Flip 4 both bear striking resemblances to the previous generation of Samsung foldables. But there are a few changes in sight. Fold or Flip 4 the…

The brand new, Google-owned undersea fibre optic Equiano cable has finally reached South African shores. It made land at Melkbosstrand in the Western Cape at a Telkom facility. But why does this matter? Well, this undersea Internet cable is supposed to bring down Internet prices and increase bandwidth for South Africans when it eventually comes online in the next month or two. We have touchdown This cable started its undersea journey in Portugal and extends down the west coast of Africa. When it was first announced in 2019, the idea was to have it land in Nigeria first. But in…

The folks at Spotify have been hard at work over the past few months. Just over a week ago, the company rolled out a new type of playlist that uses its algorithmic smarts to create a playlist based on what your Spotify friends are listening to. Now, the company has turned its focus on its mobile app interface and also its online digital audio workstation (DAW). Music and podcasts, separately With Spotify calling it quits on the Car Thing, it has more time and (human) resources to work on other things. One of those things happens to be its mobile…

Usually, when something works well the general consensus is to not change it until it’s necessary. Or, in other words, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ We think Asus and ROG might’ve missed the memo because it has released another mouse with a joystick slapped on the side. The ROG Chakram X, first seen at CES this year, is an update to the ROG Chakram, first seen at CES in 2020. The X sports a new sensor, more buttons, and different switches. Our first thought was that this was going to be nothing more than a cool gimmick you…