Author: Brett Venter

Okay, now we know that there’s a Samsung Unpacked event in the very near future. The company’s unannounced Galaxy Watch 4 Classic has turned up in official-looking renders online, showing off pretty much every aspect of the coming wearable’s design. As the name suggests, the design is more or less what we’ve been expecting from the range. It looks a little bulkier than the Active variant seen last week, along with a large rotating bezel and a much busier design. Supersizing your Galaxy Watch 4 Classic? Like the Active, though, there are two physical buttons visible on the device but…

South African’s are bound to be more familiar with Black and Decker in their guise of power tools manufacturer but, it turns out, the company has ambitions beyond making all the tool brands you’re especially fond of. The company, in kind of a surprising move, has launched a new health division. It’s started out with a line of products called goVia, which are intended for older folks living at home alone. They’re called personal emergency response (PERS) wearables. Guess what they do? The health of Black and Decker We’re using trackers and wearables for just about everything else, so Black…

Every time LG talks about its new QNED TVs, we can’t help but think of Nedal band Okilly Dokilly, a Ned Flanders-themed group — who really need to be seen (and heard) to be believed. But that’s just a convenient excuse for a silly header image, what we’re really here to talk about today are LG’s upcoming TVs, which are set to drop in the States first and the rest of the world soon after. QNED’s neighbour There are three main models of LG’s QNED mini-LED TVs heading to market, which will be available in a range of sizes. There…

South African insurance provider QSure was struck by a major data breach earlier this month, one that led to banking information and other sensitive data being compromised. The company hasn’t said how many records were scooped during the intrusion. Hope they have insurance for this Company COO Ian du Toit, speaking to TechCentral, said “On 9 June 2021, QSure became aware that it had been subject to illegal and unauthorised access to its IT infrastructure, and immediately isolated its IT network and shut down its systems.” Du Toit added, “QSure immediately appointed three industry-leading and independent cyber-forensic and security technology…

When you really think about it, Facebook doesn’t have any original ideas, except when it comes to taking things other people have already done and using them to collect personal information. Facebook is just corporate MySpace ( so without the sparkly bits) and every seemingly original idea the service has had was either paid for (Instagram, WhatsApp, the Oculus system) or stolen borrowed from its competitors. A new Bulletin from Facebook Bulletin is one of the latter. Like pretty much everything Snapchat (or Clubhouse, or TikTok, or anyone) does, Facebook’s taken someone else’s idea and created its own version of…

Whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea, the 2021 Olympics will take place in Japan this year starting from the end of July. And even though you’re not attending (if you’re in South Africa, you’re not attending as a spectator — our COVID spike isn’t nearly over), you can still show your support… and give Apple a little more money at the same time. Watch-ing the Olympics Apple’s releasing an Olympics-focused series of bands for the Apple Watch, called the Apple Watch International Collection. There are 22 bands in total and, amazingly, South Africa is one of the…

Man, Samsung really likes to have all of the attention to itself. Despite a stripped-back Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year, the company’s presentation was entirely devoted to One UI Watch, Samsung’s new wearables operating system. Not hardware, not phones, just the OS — and a promise that we’ll see it in action on something at the company’s next Unpacked event. Which will probably take place in July this year, now. One UI Watch what I can do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfSZvIqYDSM You can watch the entire event, in the event that you missed it the first time around, or you can just…

Vodacom has had VodaPay, a payments system backed by Chinese-owned Alipay, in the works for some time now. From the beginning the company has referred to the application as a ‘super app’. Now, finally, Vodacom is launching the app into the wild where we can get a closer look at it. VodaPay wants to be your VodaBankingInstitution The app, when we first heard about it, didn’t have a massive amount of detail. Now, though, you can explore it for yourself. It’s designed to allow anyone (using the app, obviously) to make or take payments (we’ll get to that in a…

This year’s main Mobile World Congress event might be subdued (and rather late) but there’s still news coming out. The Snapdragon 888 mobile processor, which was supposed to be the most powerful chip in smartphones for the year 2021, has just been supplanted. Meet the Snapdragon 888+. Wait, did Samsung develop the Snapdragon 888 Plus? Announced at MWC, Qualcomm’s newest processor is an update of the standard 888. This isn’t the first time the company has updated a flagship processor but it does throw a bit of a wrench in the works for those who were expecting the most powerful…

In perhaps the purest illustration of exactly how capitalism works, Facebook has become the latest company to hit a $1 trillion valuation. That’s according to Yahoo Finance, which lists the company’s market cap at $1,008 trillion. This is the first time Facebook has crossed the fabled barrier, and you can expect it to make the trip back and forth a few times before it becomes large enough that only a catastrophe will drop its value any lower. Facebook joins the big-time The social network has joined several other tech companies, including Google’s Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, which have all…