Author: Brett Venter

The biggest problem with Uber Eats, aside from being the person whose food is last in the drop-off queue (you can pay to avoid that), is having to wait for delivery. Traffic, outages, a restaurant that doesn’t actually exist (this really happened) — all of that can impact how quickly your tasty noms are delivered. The transport app’s food delivery arm can’t (or won’t, in some cases) do much about the latter two, but a new partnership between Uber Eats and a company called Flytrex might address the whole traffic scenario. Following a previous flirtation with drone delivery, the company…

If a Garmin kids’ smartwatch that probably won’t land at retail in SA doesn’t excite you, perhaps the Garmin Venu 4 will. An update to (obviously) the Venu 3, the newest in the product lineup brings new features to the table along with its performance upgrades. The immediately obvious ones — i.e., the ones that required fresh hardware — are new accessibility features and a new LED flashlight. The latter is something Garmin has jammed into a few of its more premium devices, so it’s not all that surprising to see here. The former gives the Venu 4 the ability to…

You might think that R5,500 is a bit much for a kids’ smartwatch, but Garmin reckons you’ll part with that much for its new Bounce 2 wearable. Looking at the distance between this and the company’s Vivofit Jr. range, they could well have a point. The Bounce 2’s design puts it in a similar camp to Garmin’s Forerunner running watches. There’s similar DNA there, meaning this actually looks like a smartwatch. There’s no cheap, chunky plastic. Instead, there’s premium plastic, and a rugged, kid-friendly appearance that parents (and perhaps the kids) will appreciate. You won’t drop $300 — the current…

Meta’s leaky ship has finally reached port, just in time to disgorge three new sets of smart glasses. Two are made by Ray-Ban, including the leaked-early Ray-Ban Display, while a new Oakley set has turned up to make life interesting for cyclists and other sporting types. One of the three new sets of wearable tech is a familiar face. The surprisingly popular standard version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses has received a hardware upgrade. It’ll still shoot video and perform AI-bolstered tasks, including translation (now in German and Portuguese), but it’ll do so with an improved 3K camera and up…

Canon’s done one, Nikon’s done one, now it’s Fujifilm’s turn. The Japanese camera brand is bringing its new GFX Eterna 55 filmmaking camera to market, with one of its landing locations situated in South Africa. Unlike Canon’s EOS C50, which favours a compact design, Fuji’s newest accessory for amateur auteurs looks like it means business. That’s because it’s not strictly for amateurs, having been designed with professional filmmaking in mind. The company will still sell it to newbies and TikTok wannabes, because a sale is a sale, but the new GFX 102MP CMOS II HS image sensor almost demands some…

Electronic pets are surprisingly popular and not just because they can’t be killed (only stunned) by neglect. Casio’s Moflin, previously launched in Japan and now coming to other regions around the world, hopes to impress owners (or horrify them) by developing its personality from scratch until it achieves “a one-of-a-kind emotional bond with [its] owner.” It’ll do this via the mundane magic of artificial intelligence, which is supposed to help “express Moflin’s emotions in real time, creating authentic and evolving interactions.” It’s not immediately clear whether it’ll evolve unique movements to accompany its verbal responses, but that would be kinda…

Space travel isn’t just about controlling a massive explosion until gravity stops caring. There’s usually a ton of scientific and technological development going on, too. NASA’s AVATAR program, announced for the manned Artemis II mission set for April next year, is one such development. Organ chips are involved. For once, this isn’t exactly what it sounds like. Instead of dried slivers of kidney and liver in a crinkly silver-interiored packet, AVATAR (A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response) will take living samples of human cells into space to “study the effects of deep space stressors, including increased radiation and microgravity.” It…

If you’ve successfully avoided installing Microsoft’s 365 Copilot app on your Windows computer thus far, your window of peace and serenity is rapidly closing. Unless you’re a member of the EEA (European Economic Area), in which case you’re safe from having Copilot thrust upon you for a while longer. Everyone else can expect to have the company’s AI app installed on their machines, provided they’re running Microsoft’s 365 desktop client apps on their machines. According to the company, from October this year, it will “begin automatically installing the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on Windows devices that have Microsoft 365 desktop…

It appears that Meta’s ‘Hypernova’ announcement, slated for later this week at its Connect conference, is the company’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses. How do we know this? Meta accidentally published a brief video to its YouTube channel that revealed the glasses. The social media company corrected its mistake as quickly as it could, but the folks at UploadVR still managed to get a look at the new glasses. The visual design is fully on display, revealing a set of eyewear that doesn’t look terribly different from the regular stuff partner company EssilorLuxottica makes. What a Ray-Ban Display The Ray-Ban Wayfarer…

LG never really abandoned the best feature of its smartphone lineup – audio. The new Xboom Buds Plus and Buds Lite are the newest audio products from the South Korean company, aiming to spread the sonic love between premium and casual listeners alike. The announcement follows the launch earlier this year of the LG Xboom Buds, the ‘stock’ version of the new in-ears. It’s just a pity that, despite carrying a range of Xboom audio gear, LG hasn’t made these available locally yet. We can probably expect a similar wait for the new stuff. Buds Plus benefits The naming convention…