Author: Brett Venter

If there’s one thing we can say about Huawei, it’s that the company doesn’t give up. Following huge setbacks in the smartphone space, it would be understandable if the Chinese tech-maker stepped back a little. Instead, it appears to be barreling on ahead. There’s a new smartphone launch in SA, the Nova 9, and then there’s also a set of business-focused notebooks from the company. But why stop there? Huawei has apparently taken a look at Samsung’s homework and decided that it’d like similar marks from the market. A report from Weibo in China claims that there’s a spot of…

3D printing is either something hobbyists do to build plastic stuff that sits on the shelf, or that has high-end applications in space or the field of medicine. This is one of the latter — doctors at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London have fitted a patient with the very first all-digital 3D printed prosthetic eye. Which is a bigger deal than it sounds. Generally, replacement eyes for those who need them are made entirely by hand. This is a lengthy process, often spanning several months. The process of creating this ocular replacement is considerably quicker. It’s also close to indistinguishable…

We’re very used to MSI’s collections of massive gaming machines, but the new Summit E16 Flip is a somewhat more delicate affair. It’s slimmer than we’re used to from MSI’s gear and is also more versatile. Since it’s part of the brand’s business-focused lineup, this makes a lot of sense. This does mean that, instead of stacking it up against, the latest gaming gear, it’s stacking up against the likes of Asus, Microsoft, and Dynabook’s business units. So how does this slim, but not exactly lightweight, contender stack up against the rest of the boardroom brigade? Business in the front……

Electric cars: They’re not just for Elon Musk anymore. Nissan has announced Ambition 2030, its intention to invest a substantial sum (more than 2 trillion yen) in electric vehicles. And not just a few either. The company hopes to dish out 23 EV models by 2030, with at least twenty of those being available in the next five years. Nissan hopes to, “…deliver exciting, electrified vehicles and technological innovations while expanding its operations globally” over the next ten years, with an eye on becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050. Because, you know, the planet’s on fire. It’s good to have…

Eventually, life imitates video games. Because video games are art, yes? Unfortunately the means eventually we’ll compete for fame in 100-person televised elimination contests where the main prize is death. But, right now, it just means that football overlords FIFA are bringing a feature from the video games to real life. At the FIFA Arab Cup 2021, the organisation is testing something called semi-automated offside technology. The name is fairly explanatory. It works like that computer-generated LBW thing from televised cricket matches, only it points out whether football players are offside. By tracking their limbs, naturally. FIFA filches features The…

Another Black Friday has come and gone. Maybe you got a bargain, probably you didn’t. That doesn’t matter, the not-so-subtle social manipulation is over for a few more weeks. It’s entirely possible that the massive psychological experiment that is Black Friday is becoming less effective, though. Like every popular IP Activision has made popular in the last decade, the late-November shopping day may be oversaturated. In other words, folks are spending less on the shopping holiday. A black day for Black Friday? At least, that’s the word according to Adobe Analytics. For the very first time ever, (American) sales totals…

The cellular phone has been around for almost 40 years now. That’s not a terribly long time, but enough change has taken place that the technology justifies its own museum. What would you call something like that? The Mobile Phone Museum has a nice ring to it (heh). Such a place exists, though its physical presence is relegated to a secure storage facility for the more than 3,500 devices the non-profit has in its collection. It comes to 2,130 different devices (at the time of writing) across more than 200 different brands. And yes, the first cellphone, the Motorola DynaTAC…

If there’s one thing we like more than testing stuff, it’s giving stuff away. But, since we don’t get to keep test units, it’s really hard for us to give kit away. We could… but then we’d be asked some serious questions by the people who actually own the device. Life’s too short for that conversation. It’s a discussion we don’t have to have today, though. Samsung gave us one Galaxy Watch3 to give away to one lucky Stuff reader, and all they had to do was a little light reading. If you wanted to get your hands on a…

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the blockchain, along comes dictionary-maker Collins to bring up NFTs again. Only this time they’re not trying to convince you that you can be the sole owner of a JPG. No, they’re here to tell you that the abbreviation for ‘non-fungible token’ is 2021’s word of the year. The annual ‘word of the year’ announcement tends to be tech-related, for the simple reason that new tech tends to create new words. There was that one year when the word of the year was an emoji. That was a fun…

Art is sort of a subjective thing. An old tin of beans can be art, in the right hands. But creating it usually takes a certain sort of mind. Wombo Dream, an AI-powered artist that works using a combination of word prompts and machine learning, may just have that mind. What’s a Wombo Dream? The app is available through a web browser, as well as on Android and iOS, and it’s a splendid little time-waster. Even more so because the images it generates are surprisingly compelling. We fed it several prompts, from Donald Trump to Seaside Views, and settled on…