Author: Brett Venter

Want to do something that you’ve never, ever done before? Watch this video of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing on the surface of Mars. Because, as weird as it seems, almost nobody (before this week) has directly watched a spacecraft land on another planet before. And, if you’re any kind of space nerd, the video is exhilarating. Perhaps it’s the cheers from NASA’s control room every time something goes right with the Perseverance landing (which they didn’t have much control over) but mostly we reckon it’s just seeing this gigantic object complete its months-long journey from Earth to the surface of…

Huawei’s still got its eye on a new folding smartphone in its stable, with details finally emerging around its new Mate X2 handset. Rather than utilising the design from its original Mate Xs, the Mate X2 looks surprisingly like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 2. The major difference? Huawei’s HMS instead of Google’s service. But Huawei’s newest folding device isn’t quite identical to Samsung’s contender. It is slightly larger, for one, even if the folding design is more or less the same. The handset actually tapers from one side to the other, making it a very expensive doorstop, if you’re that way…

There are good sides and bad sides to YouTube. The good? More video than you could watch in a hundred lifetimes, just waiting to be explored. The bad? The comments that typically live below those videos. And then there’s the nigh-incomprehensible, like the service adding the option to stream 4K video on mobile devices — even if you don’t have a 4K screen. What the 4K? Typically if you don’t have a supported device, the Android YouTube app won’t allow you to set video quality to 2160p60, or 4K. That seems to have changed, according to members of the YouTube…

It’s a good time to be a space nerd. Several missions are about to start on Mars, with NASA’s Perseverance rover being one of the most exciting — because it’s got its own helicopter, naturally. Last week the rover made it to the ground safely, now we get to check out the first snapshots of the Martian surface (not counting the potato-cam shots first shared to Twitter). We hope you enjoyed the ride NASA’s shared several images of Perseverance’s descent and landing — two of the best show the landing itself, from the point of view of the Mars Reconnaissance…

Huawei lost out on a lot when The Orange One consigned it to the hell that is the Entity List – smartphone sales dropped in western countries and the company lost access to the most used mobile operating system on the planet – Android. Well, sorta. Android still exists on Huawei’s devices but it’s lacking all manner of Google Mobile Services (GMS) support – like Maps, the Play Store and Gmail to name a few. You know, the stuff we’ve all built our lives around. Huawei has built its own replacement, in the shape of HMS, and now the company’s…

It may have been obvious this week but we’ve been rather excited about the landing of Perseverance, NASA’s newest Mars rover, on the red planet. It’s always a terrifying descent, because there are seven minutes where anything can go wrong — because the first signs of failure take ten minutes to reach Earth. That completely failed to happen on this occasion, leaving NASA’s large and expensive toy at liberty to roam around a space wasteland, looking for… stuff. Perseverance is grounded https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/1362507436611956736? Now that the new rover is on the ground, there’s loads for it to do. Only it’s not…

Some of us here at Stuff have a weakness for expensive glass. And while Fuji’s Techno-Stabi 12×28 stabilised binoculars don’t really climb the scale all the way up to expensive, at just under R10,500 it is a fair amount to ask for a set of bins with 28mm objective lenses. But, if you’ve been paying attention, there’s that word ‘stabilised’ in there that makes all the difference. Yes, you can drop R1,500 to R3,000 on a decent set of 10×25 binoculars for birdwatching but that’s all you’re going to use them for. They’re too small to work at night and…

It was about this time last year that companies were pulling out of Mobile World Congress (MWC), the largest event in the smartphone industry. The cancellations, coming amid the growing threat that is COVID-19, culminated in the event being cancelled outright. That’s not happening this year. Moving MWC Instead, Mobile World Congress is being shifted around. MWC Shanghai will take place this month, as an in-person event, followed by Mobile World proper, from 28 June to 1 July this year. And it’s an awful idea. GSMA Limited CEO John Hoffman, speaking to Mobile World Live, explained a little about what…

Samsung magically turned out a bunch of awesome audio tech (starting at about the same time they bought an awesome audio company — funny that), eventually culminating in this: Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Pro. The company’s newest in-ears are a fair chunk more expensive than the range’s immediate predecessors, the Galaxy Buds Live, are. Does Samsung offer enough to make you switch up to (kinda) the same thing in a slightly different format? Read on to find out. The best of Buds? Until you uncrate them from the identically-sized lozenge-shaped case, the Buds Pro look a whole lot like their predecessors.…

Clubhouse might be the popular new kid on the block, with other social media companies already scrambling to make their own version of the voice-based social network (we used to call that ‘talking’), but you could argue that Twitter was always heading in that direction. And now Twitter has moved a little further towards that point, rolling out voice DMs for three new countries as part of a continuing experiment for the service. If you’re a resident of Brazil, India or Japan, you have the ability to send shiny new voice DMs. More than one Clubhouse https://twitter.com/TwitterIndia/status/1361900922465644544? The short voice…