Author: Brett Venter

Another day, another smartphone, but at least the Xiaomi 15T is available in South Africa. Right now, in fact, provided you’re willing to buy one (or snag a contract) from Vodacom. The price tag is R15,000, or at least R700/m if you’re going the rental-style route, but the way Xiaomi talks about this thing, you’re getting a decent deal. That’s because it’s all about the camera for the Xiaomi 15T. The Leica 5x Pro telephoto camera specifically, appearing for the first time in the Chinese brand’s T-series smartphones. Don’t worry if you forget that point. Xiaomi will be reminding all…

If your chief complaint about your ereader is that it’s inconvenient to turn pages, the new Kobo Remote is probably the product you’ve been desperately (but lazily) searching for. The company announced the little page-turner at a R550 ($30) price point, with a 4 November launch date overseas. It’ll take time to get here, if at all, but when it does, you’ll be freed from the tyranny of engaging your shoulder, elbow, and finger to poke at a touchscreen simply to read the next sentence. You may have to move your thumb, assuming the little controller is lightly gripped in…

At least Apple doesn’t tease us for long. The American tech maker has unveiled its new M5 MacBook Pro models, set to go on sale internationally later this month. That wasn’t all Apple had in store — upgraded iPad Pro models, a revamped Vision Pro, and a few other bits and pieces were on the menu for its semi-stealth announcement. There’s… a reason it hasn’t made a huge deal of its new high-end notebooks. Mainly, the MacBook Pro devices aren’t terribly different from the M4 models. Apple, being the marketing masters that they are, calls the unchanged parts “renowned features”.…

LG has just the thing for the kitchen that has everything else in the shape of its new MoodUP refrigerator. Now available to pre-order in South Africa (for the princely sum of R140,000), the massive 617-litre fridge does its usual thing — keeping food cool and unspoiled — and a few extras besides. One of those extras is changing its appearance. Three of the MoodUP’s four door panels are packed with an array of LEDs that allow users to change the colour of their fridge at a moment’s notice through the LG ThinQ app. Why you’d want to do that…

Volvo’s new EX60 EV is set for a global reveal at the beginning of next year, but the brand has confirmed that the newest in the series will land on South African shores following its announcement. At the moment, it’s little more than a dust-covered outline, but presumably Volvo will make it worth everyone’s while to stare at a teaser image for the next six months. Meet my EX60 Volvo says that the pending EV fits in between the EX90 and EX40 Recharge in terms of performance, pricing, and features, though that doesn’t give much away. The EX90 will plunder…

ChatGPT Go, the cheapest version of OpenAI’s paid subscription service, has launched in places that aren’t its India test market. Africa, a continent known for not having much spare cash, is getting the stripped-back-but-still-paid service as of today. South Africa, being on the continent, is included in the 54-country rollout. Also coming to SA is local pricing for all of OpenAI’s subscription plans, so you’ll know what’s being deducted from your account without performing a Rand-to-Dollar calculation first. We’ll list local pricing below, but first: ChatGPT Go. ChatGPT Go-es to Africa The available paid-for features for the African Go aren’t…

Apple has something new coming down the pipe. That ‘something’ is a new M5 version of the company’s MacBook Pro. Or a collection of them. Apple tends not to release singular items, unless they’re more or less experimental. Take the M5 The company’s Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of global marketing, tweeted a teaser for whatever the American company is cooking up. It’s not much — a brief silhouette of a partially open MacBook Pro — but it’s enough for folks to take Apple’s meaning. If the V-shaped tease and Joswiak’s five-letter ‘Mmmmm’ in the tweet itself aren’t enough of…

Samsung’s Android XR headset, known internally as Project Moohan and quite possibly as the Galaxy XR, will finally greet the world on 21 October. We’d be more surprised if this information hadn’t leaked several weeks ago, but it’s still nice to have official confirmation. Paranoid, Android XR? Almost everything else about the pending headset launch has also leaked, though Samsung is doing its darnedest to pretend that hasn’t happened. The event, which Samsung has titled Worlds Wide Open (as opposed to Unpacked), will live-stream on Back to the Future day. Coincidence? Probably. But if Samsung has nailed its Android XR-based…

Advertising is everywhere else, so why wouldn’t it be in space? The idea of orbiting billboards isn’t new, but Russia’s newest government approval will let the country rake in some ad spend without completely screwing up the night sky for every human with functional eyes. Roscosmos will, according to a newly signed amendment to Russia’s laws, be able to display advertising on the country’s spacecraft. The plan, as far as is known, could make the country’s Soyuz rockets look like an American Nascar, but at least that won’t blight the night skies with blinking LEDs that zip around out of…

No matter what you think about the eventual trajectory of artificial intelligence, there’s plenty of noise being made in the space. Smaller developers can make some noise of their own by chucking one of Nvidia’s DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer” units into their workflows when they go on sale on 15 October. Nvidia calls it “the world’s smallest AI supercomputer” and, based on the visuals we’ve seen, the company probably isn’t wrong. Despite its size, the company reckons it has enough power to run inference or fine-tuning of AI models without resorting to someone else’s compute. It’ll also allow “developers…