Author: Brett Venter

So you want a new wearable fitness tracker? Fitbit’s Charge has been a stalwart of the company’s fitness line-up for ages for good reason, but the company’s recent acquisition by Google has turned up its best one yet. The Charge 5 is the first in the range to include a gorgeous colour OLED screen along with its usual run of GPS and tracking features. Finding a new band The Charge 5 looks fairly similar to the Charge 4, though some of the rough edges have been smoothed out. There are no buttons on the Charge 5 at all. That takes…

Copyright is a big deal. It is frequently used (and abused) for all sorts of things. Malaysia is the latest country to perhaps go a little overboard in its copyright protections. The country has amended its copyright law to include some rather hectic punishments for streaming piracy. Streaming piracy is exactly what it sounds like. Pirates set up streaming services and broadcast content they don’t have permission to share. Malaysia’s amended laws will see offenders who use both software and hardware to facilitate pirate streaming possibly going to jail. Malaysian Pirates And the jail term isn’t a short one. The…

Aerospace company Boeing had a bit of a mixed year. One of its planes went down, its flying refuelling drone did well, and then its Starliner was set to launch… until it didn’t. But, as with most of us, they’ve decided that next year is their year. Well, the next two years will be their year. See, Boeing’s planning on doing something new. Something awesome. Something that’ll make people sit up and take notice. The word ‘metaverse’ is coming up, you can just feel it. Virtually Boeing Boeing plans to build its next plane inside the metaverse, as it is.…

So you want to know what Garmin has in store for your definitely-gonna-lose-weight plans in 2022? Well, you don’t have to wait for anything official to turn up. Basically everything the company has coming has leaked, thanks to German website Winfuture. Four Garmins Out in the wild are four Garmin wearables; the Fenix 7 series, the Venu 2 Plus, the Epix Gen2, and the Instinct 2. Images of all the variants have turned up, including the Garmin 7, the 7X and the 7S, in their various colours  (rose gold and kinda white) and finishes (metal and plastic). The Fenix 7…

You know the type – always talking about tyre pressures, fuel efficiency, and what speed they took the last sector at. Here are twelve gifts for the motorsport mad that definitely aren’t the pits. Lego Technic Ferrari 488 GTE R3 590 / greatyellowbrick.co.za Combine a love of engineering and motorsport in one gift with this Technics Ferrari 488 GTE. It’ll take some time to assemble its 1 677 pieces into a race-spec Ferrari but the included features, including a moving V8 engine, working suspension and doors, and a functional steering wheel will make the journey a worthwhile one. This is a…

You might have a good job, but it’s probably never gonna be as cool as Ken Block’s 9-to-5. Or whatever his hours are. This rally driver has done pretty much everything, but generally, he gets given custom cars and hoons around in them. For money. The latest comes by way of Audi, who are making him a completely custom EV. The vehicle is called the Audi S1 Hoonitron, because what else were they going to call it? It’s based on the company’s iconic Sport Quattro S1 rally car, an inline five-cylinder that did interesting things in the 1980s. It’s also…

Korean automaker Hyundai’s robotic ambitions are transparent. Following its creation of spider-cars and purchase of Boston Dynamics, the company has revealed MobED. Which stands for Mobile Eccentric Droid. This is a little four-wheeled assistant that’ll do… well, all sorts of interesting things. But mostly it’ll follow you like the world’s most obedient dog, possibly carrying the world’s most disobedient dog to the vet. And MobED is coming to CES in Vegas next year. It’s a MobED scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BI8usSuo7I But since nobody ever likes to wait — and because Hyundai will take all the hype they can get — the company…

Somewhere at Samsung is a guy working on a pinboard with bits connected by string. He probably looks a little like Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and it’s his job to plan global smartphone domination. If Samsung’s Galaxy A52s 5G is any indication, our fictional Charlie is making himself redundant. The Galaxy A52s (we’re going to drop the ‘5G’ now) offers a considerable amount for its R9,000 asking price. Can other companies beat it in terms of value? Sure. Poco is one such brand. The problem is that you’ve never heard of them. Samsung has the bigger… package,…

Is there any way to make semiconductors any more efficient than they already are? IBM and Samsung seem to think so, and are out to prove it. A new technology called Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) changes how chips are made, with interesting results. Conventional FinFET chips are made into… well, fins, with sections branching off around a central channel. This new development stacks transistors vertically, letting transistor density increase without increasing a chip’s footprint. IBM squints at the very tiny future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF3Zwfu6Ngc If the only result of this new manufacturing method was more transistors, it wouldn’t be that…

Huawei doesn’t know when to quit — which is probably a good thing. The Chinese tech-maker has a new smartphone on the way. And yes, it probably folds in half. The company has chosen a funny time for the official unveiling of its newest devices — 23 December this year. Which, yes, is traditionally devoid of competition from other companies. But there tends to be a reason for that, at least in the Western world. Huawei knows when to Fold ’em Still, Huawei’s issued an invitation via its Weibo page for the 23 December event. It’s the company’s “winter flagship…