Author: Brett Venter

Mobile World Congress has been canned, which means that the usual collection of announcements just… aren’t here. They’re popping up here and there, but without much coherence. Still, some of the larger names are getting into the limelight — witness Sony’s new Xperia 1 II, the company’s newest flagship smartphone. Out of reach The name? Yeah, that’s a weird one. It’s not the Xperia One Two — apparently it’s the Xperia 1 Mk II, similar to how Sony’s cameras are named. But the name’s not that important. What’s inside the phone is. And what’s inside the phone is the latest…

We got a chance to handle the final version of the Huawei Mate Xs, poking and prodding and flipping and folding the 6in to 8in smartphone to our heart’s content. Kinda. Despite us having a large enough bag, Huawei wouldn’t let us take one home. Yet. Here’s what we learned during our time with the smartphone. 

Mobile World Congress was the first tech conference to be cancelled by a virus in 2020 but, we suspect, it won’t be the company’s last. Huawei took another route — a live-streamed version of their MWC conference. And, of course, Stuff was there. 

Huawei was always going to reveal a new folding smartphone, even though we haven’t actually seen its first draft in stores here in South Africa. And with the announcement of the new Mate Xs, it seems like the first falcon-wing folding phone is completely out of the question. Unless you’re an eBay collector-type. Beyond the Fold Huawei’s Mate Xs took more than a few shots at Samsung’s Galaxy Fold — with a few direct comparisons in spec in its presentation. Prime among those was the 8in foldable display, which now uses a multi-layer polymer screen — a material the company…

It may surprise you to hear this but not everyone — yes, including the people you like — tells the truth on Twitter. That’s fine if you’re the kinda guy with 26 followers and not a whole lot to say. But that guy with millions of followers? Many of ’em will believe that chap if he says the Earth is flat — based on little more than the fact that he has millions of Twitter followers. Twitter’s taken note of this phenomenon and is experimenting with marking false and misleading tweets by politicians and public figures with red and orange…

Maybe this deepfake video, by placing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the shoes of an alien overlord bent on enslaving (some of) humanity, is offering up some sort of social commentary. Or maybe it just looks cool having Bezos face off against Tesla/SpaceX head Elon Musk.

Your struggle for power doesn’t have to be a massive struggle. We’re all rocking electric devices and those devices make life easier when it comes to power outages. The trick is keeping those devices topped up when Eskom’s out — three hours of gaming on a Nintendo Switch will ding the battery pretty hard. There is an obvious answer, though: batteries.

Another day, another Apple rumour. This one, from Taiwan, claims that Apple’s got a new 12in iPad Pro waiting in the wings. It’s said to have a new three-lens 3D time-of-flight camera sensor, which would allow the tablet to pack far more of a photographic punch. You’d still look like a bit of a git taking photos with an iPad, though. Reveal date? According to Digitimes, its sources have said: “Apple is set to release its new 12-inch iPad Pro model featuring a rear-end three-lens ToF 3D sensor in the spring [that’s around March to all of us Southern Hemisphere…

Just because something can be used for evil doesn’t mean we should completely chuck it out the window. If we dismissed all deepfakes, we wouldn’t be so sure that what the world needs right now is a Back to the Future remake/sequel with MCU actors Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. 

In a world where streaming is making life as uncomfortable as possible for traditional TV suppliers (without the reintroduction of public flogging), you’d think that price increases would be a thing of the past. But inflation hasn’t gone away just because Netflix is in South Africa and it’s for that reason that Multichoice has announced price increases for its DStv packages.