Author: Brett Venter

If you were using Facebook back in 2009, before Instagram was a thing and when WhatsApp was still a minor contender, chances are you were plagued by the sort of notifications that were considered ‘normal’ back then. Notifications to help water crops and to start your very own virtual farm. Yeah, we used to use the internet for serious business a little over a decade ago, if you consider Farmville in any way serious. Beyond ‘seriously irritating’, that is. But that irritation is finally coming to an end. Farmville, the game that filled your feed (such as it was) with…

Google’s free Maps service is massively useful (while also being the reason just about nobody owns a dedicated GPS unit). And, in this time of pandemic, Google Maps has become just a little more useful. The service has added broader COVID-19 data to Maps as a layer, letting users see country data at a glance. Infection here It’s not, as you might have hoped (or maybe it’s just us), a detailed look at your neighbourhood’s infection rates. It won’t show little Red Zones that need avoiding, like you’re navigating a Resident Evil game. Rather, the new Google Maps layer shows…

We all used to be a lot more connected with our smartphone batteries. Well, it was a different time. Every phone used to have a removable battery, and removing it was your go-to when something wonky happened to your phone. Just pop the case open, pry the battery out and stare at the thing like it insulted your mother before reassembling it and hoping that fixed the software lockup that called for an unscheduled rapid disassembly. Back then, there were a lot of myths and legends about your cellphone battery as well. You had to take the phone out the…

Now this is a feature we’d dearly love to see in South Africa but, somehow, we think the Americans need it just a little more right now. Ring, which has a very interesting camera/drone combo on the way in the new year, also has a fancy new dashcam due. And the Ring Car Cam has a fancy new feature to go along with it. Racing Rings around the competition Ring’s new car camera (they don’t seem to be calling it a dashcam) works just like any other moderately-priced dashcam — it’s got a front and rear-facing camera and it’ll record…

It’s the sort of thing you might expect from a movie about a smart building that kills people (there is at least one and it wasn’t even made by the Sharknado folks). Ring, they of the smart doorbells and cameras, have announced the Always Home Cam, a smart camera that’ll fly around your house to see what’s going on when you’re not there. Droning on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2jFN_QEcS4&feature=emb_logo Part drone, part IP camera, the Always Home Cam works in a few ways. When it’s first unpacked, you can map your home and send it commands to check a certain room on demand.…

So you’ve been eyeing Chinese brand Oppo’s technologically-advanced range of smartphones, have you? So have we, truth be told, but it’s such a mission to try and get them here from China or another country that actually has them. Until, that is… until now. Oppo is officially launching in South Africa. But they’re not going balls to the wall right at the start. Oppo’s bringing in a trio of its mid-range handsets this year to test the waters, before its flagships descend on South Africa in the first half of 2021. And those will be its new flagships, not the…

If it seems like there are more Unpacked events than is usual at the moment, don’t worry. You’re not going mad. Samsung’s definitely being a little more active than usual. This time we’ve got an Unpacked “For Every Fan”, which is a fine want to introduce the company’s Galaxy S20 Fan Edition. We’ve been expecting it. Which is… well, an edition for fans. In previous years it would have been called the Galaxy S20 Lite but Samsung probably doesn’t like the connotations there. ‘Fan Edition’ sounds… more marketable. However you describe it, the S20 Fan Edition is a cut-down version…

If you ever upload anything to YouTube (someone’s doing it, there’s a lot of video being added daily), you’ll have noticed in recent months that the service was pressuring you on whether your content was kid-friendly or not. The point, as YouTube explains it, is to give its creators the ability to restrict content themselves since… well, you know what you put in the video. Now, though, YouTube’s scaling things up a little by also letting an AI make the call on age-restricting videos. 18 SVLN YouTube said that before year’s end it will increasingly use machine-learning to identify which…

In all the fuss of Samsung taking centre stage (here in South Africa, anyway) in the folding phone category, it might have been easy to miss the world’s first folding smartphone. That’d be the Royole FlexPai, an oddly-named device… which is fine, because it’s oddly-shaped as well. That phone, first revealed in January 2019, wasn’t especially good. This next one, the Royole FlexPai 2, is supposedly better. Know when to fold ’em https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2271&v=WH8aqXR01A4&feature=emb_logo The sequel to the phone that got there first (but hasn’t gotten to South Africa yet) was shown off in a recent presentation by Royole (watch it…

The really great thing about being a Star Wars fanatic is that a) you get to fight in parking lots with Star Trek fans every second Wednesday of the month and b) there’s always more Star Wars stuff on the way. Lego in particular is famous for its Star Wars sets and there’s a new one inbound. And this one’s… a little cuter than average. Look, it’s not like you’re blind to images but can magically read text. You already know that Baby Yoda from The Mandalorian is what we’re talking about. The new 1,073-piece set from Lego is called…