Author: Brett Venter

The chip shortage is causing all sorts of changes in the tech world. Some items are harder to get (like game consoles), some cars are dumping features until supplies improve, and some car manufacturers — like Ford and GM — are becoming involved in the chip manufacture process. But the American automakers aren’t setting up their own production plants. Instead, they’re making deals with various established chip-makers to ensure that there’s enough silicon to go around. Presumably just for themselves. They’re probably not too concerned with BMW’s current fate. A-Ford-able chipsets? Ford announced that it would team up with GlobalFoundries…

SpaceX has made substantial progress on its Starship launch vehicles. You know, the one it suspects will take humans to Mars? The company went from blowing them up in various ways to actually landing one. Immediately, plans were started to launch one into orbit for a few revolutions before returning it to Earth. When this feat would be achieved, however, was the subject of speculation. Original estimates had the test taking place before March 2022, but Elon Musk has pushed that timeline back a little. Provided nothing expensive happens in the meantime, of course. Starship knee-deep in hoopla Speaking at…

Last year Sony returned its TV lineup to South Africa, and today the company dumped a whole lot of its new Bravia XR sets right into our lap. Stuff was at the launch today in Johannesburg, which was a subdued affair involving a handful of people and a selection of truly impressive TV tech. We got to experience several different aspects of Sony’s TVs. There are ten different models launching into the country — of those, four are the headliners. These are the Bravia XR sets, with two OLED and TV of Sony’s Full-Array models being part of the company’s…

There’s not a lot of innovation happening in smartphones. They all look the same, with the major changes being constant across product lines and brands. To really shake up the world of smartphones, it’s apparently necessary to think about… toast? Yeah, that’s right. Meet the Balmuda phone. The Balmuda phone is made by a Japanese company that specialises in making luxury toasters if you can believe it. And, unusually for an established company that ‘decided to release a phone’, it hasn’t just gotten a generic slab of something and rebadged it. That would be far too easy, and it’d also…

You’re never going to believe this — Samsung’s got another mid-range phone headed to market soon, in the shape of the Galaxy A33. How do we know this? Well, besides the fact that we know how to add a single digit to the thing Samsung did last time, press images of the device have turned up online. And they are press images, no matter how much noted leaker OnLeaks and website 91Mobiles make them out to be chance renders. At this point, we’re starting to suspect that OnLeaks has a second email address that ends in ‘@samsung.com’. Guardians of the…

Honda is a name we don’t hear enough from in the tech space. The Japanese company is looking to change that, with more investment in some interesting spheres. But, in the meantime, here’s something a bit more immediate. Meet Honda’s Autonomous Work Vehicle, or AWV. Which is exactly what it sounds like — it’s an autonomous cart designed to trundle around construction sites and deliver materials to humans who do the really intricate work. Honda takes somebody’s jerbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtGYnBNG7U The Honda AWV is spending time at a solar farm construction site in New Mexico. Fleets of them are roaming up…

Starlink, the Elon Musk-backed satellite internet service that will turn up in South Africa any day now, will offer its users a choice. There’s the original Dishy McFlatface satellite base station, which looks like a DStv dish on a tripod. Then there’s the new thing — a smaller rectangular design. Starlink’s new star Starlink’s original dish, used by those participating in the company’s beta, is fairly conventional in terms of design. This new one, though, looks like it’s designed to be delivered by a Cybertruck. It’s a strange design for a satellite receiver, but it’s got a purpose. It’s smaller,…

If you thought that Huawei would get a better deal in the States with the departure of former president Donald Trump, you would be mistaken. Current president Joe Biden has signed the country’s new Secure Equipment Act, which puts the brakes on for several Chinese companies. The USA says ‘Biden’ to Huawei The act prevents companies considered to be security threats by the United States — Huawei and ZTE among them — from securing new equipment licenses from US regulators. The act was approved earlier this year, passing through the country’s House and Senate almost unanimously. The terms of the…

Remember last year, when it was really, really difficult to find a PlayStation 5 console anywhere? Remember how 2021 so far has seemed like a carbon copy of 2020? Can you see where we’re going with this? Yup, it seems like Nintendo isn’t the only console maker to encounter issues with supplying enough consoles for the end of the year. Sony’s gigantic new plaything also faces supply issues for the end of this year. The reason? The same reason every other tech-maker on the planet is having issues — the ongoing semiconductor shortage. We like our PlayStation 5 consoles rare…

Ever since Facebook brought up its whole metaverse idea, it’s all the tech world seems to be able to talk about. Samsung, purveyor of all sorts of technology for much of the world, isn’t immune to that, it seems. The South Korean tech maker has announced its latest set of mobile RAM, its first 14nm LPDDR5X hardware. The company says it is “…designed to drive further growth throughout the high-speed data service applications including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.” Samsung enters a new electric dimension Which, apparently, means that the metaverse is coming for us all. In all…