Author: Brett Venter

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…

Sony’s Xperia phones have definitely got South African fans. Fans that, sadly, can no longer officially get their hands on the handsets thanks to the company largely pulling its phone lineup out of the country. So every time Sony announces a new handset in the range, it’s a little bittersweet. That’s the case here as well, with the new Sony Xperia 5 II. Place of power And that’s because the 6.1in smartphone is one of Sony’s most powerful and feature-packed devices yet. That OLED screen runs at 120Hz, giving Samsung’s biggest phones a run for their money, and there’s a…

There are two ways to drive a 4×4. There’s the right way, which means to take it off-road to some far-flung destination, and then there’s the wrong way, which is to make sure you never ever leave tarmac and city streets. Land Rover’s new Defender 110 looks like it was designed explicitly for the latter, while being exceedingly capable at the former. Which, really, is how you want to go off-road in 2020. ‘Roughing it’ is fine and well but there’s no reason to be uncomfortable on the way to your destination. And taking the 110 anywhere ensures you’ll be…

A German ransomware attack may have resulted in the death of a woman, perhaps the first officially documented death as a result of a cyberattack that locked down hospital services. The attack, which took place last week in Dusseldorf, indirectly killed an emergency patient who had to be rerouted to an alternative hospital some 32km away in Wuppertal. The woman, who wasn’t identified, was unable to begin emergency treatment for an hour longer than expected as a result of the detour. She died soon afterwards. The perpetrators of the attack are currently being investigated for negligent manslaughter, which was probably…

Retail spaces were going through some tough times, even before the spectre of COVID reached our shores and left shopping centres as empty as… well, as a disaster movie. But Massmart-owned retailer Game has a few new ideas about how shopping in person should work and they’re currently showing them off in its Mall of Africa store. The results are… surprisingly technological. Getting in and out, quick There’s an all-new store design at Game, conceived to get buyers in and out as quickly as possible. This might seem coldly capitalist but it’s also extremely practical. You don’t want to spend…