Author: Brett Venter

There are only really two uses for Twitter — breaking news and then complaining about everything else that folks post on Twitter. It’s also a great way to give yourself depression unless you surround yourself in a happy little bubble that includes WeRateDogs, darth, wint, and God. But using the service for anything approaching news-gathering is a one-way ticket to trolls, facial tics and therapy. And since 2021 is just 2020: Part Duh, we’ve all got enough negative crap going on without adding constant dopamine-fuelled injections of melancholy into the mix. It might be time to delete your Twitter account.…

Samsung confirmed many of the things we thought we knew about its newest series of smartphones at last night’s event. One of those things was the existence of an S Pen for the Galaxy S21 Ultra, allowing people who like the Note’s scribbling to do the same on something that isn’t a Note. It’ll launch with the handset, but it’ll cost you R1,000 extra to get one for your (already pricey) smartphone. But if you’re not in the market for a wildly-expensive new smartphone, you don’t have to give your wallet a coronary in order to get a Samsung stylus…

That’s right, just about everything you heard was true. Samsung’s Everyday Epic Unpacked event saw the company launching three new smartphones – the Galaxy S21, the Galaxy S21 Plus and the Galaxy S21 Ultra. If you’re Samsung, you’re being difficult about the naming. Technically each of these has a ‘5G’at the end because each of the phones supports 5G. Now if only we had more of it here in South Africa. Here’s what you need to know The S21 they want you to want The Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra 5G is the smartphone the South Korean company wants you to…

If you’ve been following tech for long enough, specifically wearable tech, then you’ll remember the Pebble. The original Kickstarter phenomenon sparked a serious wearable trend but the e-paper device wasn’t big on features. It’s still pretty unique, though — as is its spiritual successor, called Watchy. Best of all, it’s designed to let you do a little tinkering of your own, ensuring that your Watchy really is as unique as you can make it. Watchy what I can do By which we mean: you’re going to have to put it together. The weird wearable is built around an ESP32 board…

HTC. That’s a name we haven’t heard in years. The HTC Desire, if you’re old enough to remember the launch of Android, was once one of the most desirable smartphones on the market but in recent years the company has slipped from our radars. When last we heard, HTC was making blockchain-specific smartphones like the Exodus 1 and spending its efforts on virtual reality gear. But now the company’s back with an all-new (and traditional) Android smartphone of a sort that we haven’t seen in literal years. This is the HTC Desire 21 Pro 5G. An object of Desire? The…

In a little over 24 hours Samsung’s first event of the year, Galaxy Unpacked 2021, will kick off. Fans here at home and around the world can sit in on the digital event that’ll show off the South Korean company’s first flagship handsets of the season. But if you’ve been paying attention, you may not need to check out what Samsung has to say at all. Besides pricing and concrete availability dates here in SA, there’s not much the company can do to surprise us. That isn’t to say there isn’t the potential for a shock but it’s very unlikely.…

WhatsApp, the largest messaging app on the planet, is having an unpleasant time at present. Competitors, like Telegram, are catching a lot of the exodus from the Facebook-owned service, in the wake of a terms and conditions update that was less a notification and more an ultimatum. Attempting to limit some of the damage, Facebook has shared an FAQ concerning its privacy policy update. It says that, based on “…some of the rumors going around, we want to answer some of the common questions we have received.” Unfortunately, the company doesn’t really address anything that actually sparked outrage last week.…

Anyone paying even the remotest attention to last week’s news will have noticed that soon-to-be-former American president Donald Trump was toppled from his Twitter throne, with Facebook’s various platforms following suit. The ban, initially a temporary initiative, quickly became a permanent deplatforming for the departing politician. In Facebook’s case, Trump is banned from posting to the social network at least until he is no longer the American president. In Twitter’s case, Trump is banned indefinitely. The reason given is that Trump’s “…statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence…”, eventually finding that Trump’s account is in violation…

It was late last year that Sony let slip that it would be launching Airpeak, its own drone, on the market. We guess all that practise with making fans for games consoles somehow naturally translated to tech that actually takes off (instead of just sounds like it’s about to). At this year’s CES, the Japanese tech-maker revealed a little more of its drone ambitions. Specifically, the drone itself, in a video presentation that shows off some of its skills in action. Not much is known about the drone on a purely technical level — we don’t know what sort of…

An LG Rollable might sound like something you can buy at one of the more adventurous Amsterdam coffeeshops but it’s actually the official name of the South Korean company’s most ambitious phone to date. And remember, we’re talking about a company that released the LG Wing in the past six months. While we’ve been aware of LG’s aims in this direction for a while, we didn’t have much information about a possible rollable smartphone. Now… we’ve got a name, and a timeline for release. But not much else. Locking down an LG Rollable LG presented little more than a teaser…