Author: Brett Venter

We’ve got quite a history of making fun of Facebook’s range of Portal devices and the new Portal Go, announced last night, is no different at all. We’re sure they’re very nice devices if you meet them in person but they seem, largely, to be all about scooping up more data for Mark Zuckerberg’s volcano-based, all-encompassing advertising AI. Portal Go somewhere else But for the first time, the surveillance tech made by Facebook has become a properly portable Portal. The Portal Go, which retails for about R3,000 (or $200, if you’re somewhere you can actually buy one), is a fabric-covered…

Amazon’s 10th-gen Kindle Paperwhite, released back in 2018, is very nearly the perfect eReader but that doesn’t make Jeff Bezos more money so the company’s got something new on the way. How do we know this? Well, Amazon mucked up and posted the details to its website a little early. Here’s what we (already) know, ahead of anything like an official announcement. Spotted in the Amazon  Website Good eReader spotted an updated product listing on Amazon Canada’s website, a listing that has since been disappeared from the internet. The comparison shows that there’s a Kindle Paperwhite 5 (which would be…

Samsung’s range of Frame TVs are just like its regular television sets, with a very slight difference — they don’t look like TV sets. Instead, they’re rather cleverly disguised as picture frames (provided you’ve got it mounted on a wall somewhere), capable of showing all manner of artwork. Well, the range just got a little larger, thanks to a new partnership with the Musée du Louvre. Samsung, but French Which means, if you own one of the company’s Frame TVs, you no longer have to travel to Paris to take in artwork like The Mona Lisa or The Wedding at Cana…

As with Samsung’s last folding smartphone, let’s get the worst part of the Galaxy Z Fold 3 out of the way right up front — at R38,000, it’s still far too expensive for most users. That said, two things have happened since 2020. Many things have happened since 2020 but only two of them matter in this context: Samsung’s folding hardware has become R12,000 cheaper and the overall experience has also improved. That doesn’t mean that it has become an essential buy — that day will come, but it’s not today. But if you’ve got a) the budget and b)…

Rolls-Royce might seem like it’s all about luxury vehicles for people who have too much money to bother thinking about driving themselves around, but what the company has historically been all about is engines. Loads and loads of really amazing engines. So when the company, which is best known for making the kind of motors that forged aluminium silicon alloys want to be when they grow up, starts mucking around with electric motors, you know that something great is on the way. Truly, the Rolls-Royce of electric aircraft https://vimeo.com/605839135 And, for the moment, that greatness takes the form of the…

Automaker Hyundai recently bought a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics, the robotics company with a flair for making entertaining, yet disquieting, videos of its robots in action. On the heels of Spot learning to take just a little more autonomy for itself, its newest parent company has announced a brand-new version of the robotic quadruped. Called the ‘Factory Safety Service Robot’, this roaming Spot-a-like has a brand new job — patrolling Hyundai’s factories. Hyundai the impression this is a good thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAJDICCll8 Boston Dynamics’ little workhorse work… er… canine has been tweaked and upgraded with a brand new set of…

Apple’s iPhone hardware has long been powerful. We don’t really hear as much as we should, because Android fans don’t like to talk about it, but the iPhone 13 — according to the first benchmark results turning up online — continues the trend of walloping the best processor hardware Android can field. Ah, well, there’s always next year. Taking on the iPhone 13 At present, the top score-holder for Android performance on Geekbench 5 (the cross-platform software we use when benchmarking… pretty much everything here at Stuff) is anything with a Snapdragon 888 processor. We’ve picked on the OnePlus 9…

Wipeout is one of the game series that made the PlayStation platform what it is today, but actual games have been sparse of late. Wipeout Rush is the latest entry into the storied series but the mobile game, developed by a company called Rogue, is a far cry from anything like the iconic futuristic high-speed racer. Actually, Wipeout Rush sounds appropriate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qmulgPZ2cg On the surface, it looks as though Rogue has nailed everything. The music (it’s not The Chemical Brothers, but very little is), the robotic voice that will tell you what your weapon pickups are, the visuals… it should…

Boston Dynamics Spot robotic dog is, depending on who you ask, either an existential threat to humanity or an essential tool that has a load of potential as a robotic companion. However you feel about that (and those are just opinions, yeah?), it’s a fact that Spot the robo-dog is now much less reliant on human control than it was previously. Spot just wants to be a good doggo https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/1220392791408177152?lang=en Boston Dynamics’ robotic canine has just received a new update (called Release 3.0) that enables all sorts of new behaviours for the yellow quadruped. Perhaps the most exciting is the…

The universe is a large place. So large that we can’t see all the way to the other side of it (yet). The solution? A simulated universe, of course. That’s just what scientists from around the world have created: Uchuu (which is Japanese for ‘outer space’), an artificial universe that you could totally download — if you had enough storage space available. Making a simulated universe Uchuu is a 2.1 trillion particle simulation that is 9.83 billion light-years from side to side, created using a dedicated astronomy supercomputer called ATERUI II. Even using a supercomputer, the simulation took years to…