Author: Brett Venter

One of the unpleasant things about living in South Africa is that sometimes our tech isn’t entirely functional. Services and features are all too often geo-limited. Well, Sonos and Amazon have ensured that there’s one less item on the list — Alexa voice control for Sonos products. South Africa isn’t entirely special, however. Yes, Alexa support is coming to various Sonos devices but it’s also coming to 26 other countries. Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and…

When you talk about Facebook, it’s generally appropriate to use the word ‘billions’ in conversation. The company bought VR company Oculus for $2 billion. It passed 2 billion monthly users some time in 2017. At the time, it saw a little over 1.2 billion of those users turning up every day. Well, now there’s a new milestone for Mark Zuckerberg and co. to celebrate. The company’s most recent earnings reports dropped a surprising statistic — Facebook has crossed the 2 billion daily users mark. Facebook hungers To be fair to the company, it has been creeping up on the total…

Netflix giveth and occasionally the streaming platform taketh away. Mostly it taketh away just lately, with the company cracking down on sharing accounts outside of single households and eying paid password revenue. It’s about time it tried something else. That ‘something’ is making its most expensive tier just a little more attractive. After all, getting subscribers to go from a standard subscription to a Premium one counts as increased revenue. And, if you’re a certain sort of viewer, the streaming platform’s incoming upgrades might just justify the cost. Sounds like a good idea, Netflix The company announced new features for…

Stuff had a chance to play with Samsung’s newest smartphones. We got our hands on the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra… for a few minutes. It wasn’t nearly long enough for a proper review but it was enough to show us that Samsung hasn’t taken any steps backwards. It was also enough to show that the company hasn’t made any massive strides forward. Once you hit a certain level of quality there’s bound to be diminishing returns and Samsung’s handsets… have just been too good lately. There’s not much headroom for improvement. A refined experience If there hasn’t been…

Samsung has launched its year in technology with an impressive debut — the Galaxy S23, S23+, and S23 Ultra all made their expected appearances at the first Unpacked of the season. And, as expected, everything’s just a shade bigger and/or faster than it was last year. It’s also apparent that there’s a proper leaky spigot inside Samsung. The full spec for the S23 Ultra, give or take a few fine details, was known thanks to a Chinese regulator as far back as December 2022. Still, rather than dwell on what was or wasn’t predicted, it’s time to move on to…

ChatGPT parent (hopefully that isn’t a literal description) OpenAI has unveiled a tool designed to tell its users whether a section of text was written by a human being or an AI. Because, to slightly paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, they were so preoccupied with whether they could [build a convincing writing AI], they didn’t stop to think if they should. ChatGPT Runner The new tool, called an AI classifier, is trained to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs from a variety of providers.” But, as with everything to do with AI, there’s a catch. For…

All good things must come to an end. By this, we mean that some Xbox 360 games that were previously available on the South African online store are going away in the very near future. This is the result of an upcoming update for the console’s marketplace. It’s not just South Africa being whacked with the cancellation stick, either. In fact, as countries go, we’re being let off relatively lightly. That… might have something to do with our region having fewer games on its store, however. Last call for (these) Xbox 360 purchases Among the Xbox 360 games disappearing from…

Tomorrow evening will see Samsung launch its very first Unpacked event of the year. We, along with the rest of the world, are reasonably certain we know what will turn up at the event but nothing’s written in stone. Not yet, anyway. Rumours for Samung’s upcoming smartphones — the company likes to start the year strong — have been floating around since late last year. The demise of the flagship Exynos is all but certain in the Galaxy S23 lineup but there’s more to be confirmed. Watch the S23 Unpacked Of course, in order to confirm all that, you’ll have…

The folks behind the Electronic Entertainment Expo (otherwise known as E3) in Los Angeles recently touted 2023 as the event’s big return to in-person action. The announcement of the event’s triumphant return followed speculation — including on Stuff’s part — that the whole event was toast. 2023’s return was supposed to lay those fears to rest. Well… about that. Same E3, fewer attendees A report from IGN suggests that the so-called Big Three — the companies that also make games consoles — will not be in attendance at all this year. Nintendo scaled back its presence at the expo at…

At the beginning of the year, you’re probably thinking about smartphones and how they pertain to you. You’re also thinking about how much the month of January sucked in terms of expenses. If you’re a student, you’ve probably got both of these points very much in mind. So why not combine them? There are high-end smartphones everywhere you look these days. Trouble is, those handsets come with high-end pricing. Believe it or not, you don’t have to spend flippin’ great big wodges of cash in order to have an excellent smartphone in your pocket. We’ve collected a handful of smartphones…