Author: Brett Venter

If lockdown taught us anything it’s that you can make all sorts of interesting things from pineapples. Including, yes, beer. But before you spend much more time working on your homemade go-blind juice, researchers from Malaysia’s Putra University — headed by  Professor Mohamed Thariq Hameed Sultan — have come up with a way to turn pineapples into disposable drones. So it doesn’t really matter if you fly these things drunk — unless you’re crashing into things and people. Don’t do that. But if you do wreck your flying craft, it’s not rendered into shards of plastic that need to be…

This is it. This is the big one. The annual Stuff Reader Smartphone of the Year award might not look like the most exciting thing in the world from the outside but we get to see the voting every year and it tends to get… messy. Which might be why we love it so much. People are passionate about their smartphones and brand loyalty is a serious thing here in SA. So we’re not expecting any issues when it comes to letting users choose which smartphone released in 2020 was the very best of the best. But that might be…

Stuff is putting together the winners of 2020 — the tech winners, rather than general winners. There weren’t many general winners last year, unless you owned your own government official. But there’s one award — the Reader Gadget of the Year award — that we can’t do alone. Because… well, we’re not readers. We just get to make this thing happen which, yes, does include a substantial amount of reading. But it’s not the same thing. Making the Reader Gadget of the Year Choosing Stuff’s Gadget of the Year is a simple process. First we get a boat and a…

The time has come. That’s right, it’s that time of the year where we ask you to do a little of our work for us. The Stuff Magazine Game of the Year is a weighty decision and we still have bruises from the last time we… ahem… discussed matters. About the only thing we can agree on is that it probably won’t be Cyberpunk 2077. It’s better if you’re the people making the call on this one — our medical aid plans will thank you for it. Picking the Game of the Year We’ve collected a handful of the very…

Samsung’s made its first Unpacked event of 2021 official and, like most of last year, it’s set to be a digital one. The first Unpacked of 2021 takes place on 14 January, in line with previous reports and rumours, and should see Samsung revealing what it has got for us for the first half of the year. Which has a little something to do with “the Everyday Epic”, according to the event’s tag-line. This suggests that the S21 lineup is set to be a little more affordable — or maybe we’re just daydreaming here. It certainly suggests that Samsung wants…

Jaguar makes some pretty cool cars but one of its coolest is also one of its most unattainable. The new Jag Vision GT SV (which stands for Jaguar Vision Gran Turismo SV) is a new electric car from the company. But it only exists at Jag itself as a physical vehicle. For everyone else, you’ll have to wait for a digital version to turn up. In Gran Turismo, obviously. 2020 Vision GT SV The Vision GT SV is based on the Jaguar Vision Gran Turismo Coupé and makes use to some of Jag’s Formula E tech to create an endurance…

It really is getting to be about that time again. Samsung springs a leak every time a handset is due and with the talk being that the Galaxy S21 is turning up in January next year, it was only a matter of time before we found out more. We’ve already seen the handsets teased in a series of video shorts, now it’s time for the colour options to be spoiled ahead of the official launch. A Phantom of the Galaxy S21 German tech website WinFuture has the low-down on (possibly all of) the colour options due for the Galaxy S21…

Apple, if you’re not already aware of it, is ramping up its privacy controls in iOS. More importantly, the company is making it so users have to opt-in to tracking, rather than the default approach for many platforms — which is to make it all opt-out and to keep moving the settings for that around. Facebook, a company built on absorbing personal data and converting it into money, doesn’t like that idea very much. So much so that Facebook this week took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post calling out Apple for…

Industry talk had Samsung pegged as retiring its rather unique Galaxy Note lineup, folding its features into the S-series and the all-new Fold, which seems to be sticking around. The Galaxy S21 was supposed to feature S Pen support, along with the Galaxy Fold 3, with the Galaxy Note making a graceful exit from the market. At least, that was the world a couple of weeks ago. Now, it appears, Samsung’s Note might be on-track for a 2021 launch after all. An anonymous Samsung spokesperson tells South Korean news agency Yohnap that “[w]e are preparing to release the Galaxy Note…

Sometimes it’s a good thing that we have to wait for the newest tech to get here. Okay, we might just be trying to cheer ourselves up but Apple’s iOS 14.3 has just launched, a few days ahead of official iPhone 12 availability in South Africa, and the OS update brings with it access to Apple’s new ProRAW image format, which is supposed to do all sorts of magical things. Like making image editing slickers and smoother by combining Apple’s post-processing with the versatility of the RAW image format, for instance. What’s new in iOS 14.3 ProRAW is now available…