Author: Brett Venter

Space has been in the news as of late and while both the UAE and China had missions arrive at the red planet this month, NASA offers the most spectacular footage. But China’s also got its sights set on the final frontier in a larger capacity. To that end, the country has revealed plans for a new super-heavy rocket, called Long March 9 (also known as CZ-9), which is intended to get humans from this rock we live on to other rocks, far, far away. The Long March 9 to freedom The existence of the rocket system was revealed this…

The year was 2014. It was the last time we officially saw a Samsung-made laptop in the South African market. Since then, there has been intermittent talk of the company bringing its range of computer hardware back to SA but nothing has come of it. We hope that changes. Because Samsung’s rumoured to be trying something a little different with its notebook hardware soon. It’ll still be making the conventional stuff, but it’s what’s inside that counts. And the South Korean tech-maker is rumoured to be including Exynos processors in its Windows machines soon. Surprising Samsung That’s the word according…

Let’s just start off by saying that Boston Dynamics, the company behind Spot, Atlas, and a collection of other interesting robots, isn’t happy about this. A group calling themselves MSCHF (pronounced ‘mischief’) has acquired one of the company’s Spot robots and they’re about to use it to prove a point. The point is about weapons, and police departments, and guns, and the way MSCHF is attempting to make that point is by letting the internet control Spot. Only Spot now has a paintball gun mounted on top of his head. This sounds like a fun time, until you consider the…

Haptic response on devices toting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 chipset is set to improve, thanks to a little trip to the Lofelt. The chipmaker has entered into a new partnership with the company, which sounds like it belongs in the Kruger National Park, which will see haptics improvements conferred on devices later this year. Longing for the Lofelt The deal will improve the haptic feedback on Android phones sporting the Snapdragon 888, with the improvements added via a software update in the second half of 2021. Specifically,  “Lofelt and Qualcomm will deliver a universal haptic software framework that runs natively on…

It’s a chaotic time in the smartphone market. Mid-way through 2020, Huawei kicked Samsung off its podium and now Apple’s gone and done the same for the end of 2020. Market research firm Gartner, detailing the 5% decline in world smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2020, also pointed out that Samsung’s dominance has, once again, been temporarily curtailed. By the American phenomenon, Apple, obviously. The Apple of Tim’s eye The last time Apple stood atop the pile was in Q4 of 2016 — four years is a long time to wait to dethrone your nemesis, we reckon. The…

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…