Author: Brett Venter

There’s a whole lot that we can do with smartphones — you can bank, watch media, listen to music, control your house if you’ve been investing in some home automation tech… but what about actually touching someone? That’s an ability that MobiLimb is attempting to give to smartphone users. MobiLimb is the creation of a bunch of French researchers, who have managed to attach a finger to a smartphone via its microUSB port. The digital digit is powered by an Arduino controller and five servomotors and is capable of being many things — including a more human sort of finger…

Here’s something to make you rest a little better this weekend (and for the rest of the year, probably). Instagram is testing a new function that would share your location with Facebook — even when you’re not using the app. Researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted that Instagram is “prototyping” the ability to share a user’s location, via a setting called Location History, with Facebook. That GPS data could be shared even if users are not using the app. The reasoning for this feature is it will allow users to “…explore what’s around you, get more relevant ads, and helps improve Facebook”.…

LG’s V40 ThinQ smartphone is a rumour no longer — the South Korean company has officially unveiled its five-camera handset, detailing all of the bits and pieces we can expect inside it — as well as giving us a fair look at what we can expect to see in the LG G8 when it’s announced. Back to the main show, though, the highlight of LG’s V40 ThinQ is obviously the camera arrangement. LG has packed the rear with three camera sensors: a 12MP f/1.5 sensor which uses larger pixels (1.4μm) than those seen in the LG G7, the same super-wide…

Microsoft has been making some good hardware of late, an idea that we still can’t quite wrap our heads around. They’re supposed to be great at operating systems and games consoles, terrible at phones, and excellent at peripherals. But if they keep on putting out computing hardware like the set announced last night at a New York event, we’re going to have to revise exactly what the company is best known for. Here’s a list of (most of) what they announced yesterday evening. Quite a few sequels Microsoft pulled the covers off several new computing devices at their reveal event,…

It was back in June that we saw the first trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which showed off a world in which there was more than one Spider-Person running about. The second trailer for the upcoming Sony film has dropped and there will be even more Spider-Beings running around than we expected. Several of the heroes from various Spider-Man universes are present in Sony’s animated flick. Peter Parker (Spider-Man Prime, we guess — Jake Johnson), Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), and Gwen Stacy (as Spider-Gwen — Hailee Steinfeld) are the arachnids we already knew about from the first trailer, but…

There’s a lot going on over at the Facebook-owned outfits. Instagram’s founders have bounced, there’s been another (huge) data breach, and Facebook is starting to use phone numbers for advertising — let’s add another item to the pile, this one concerned with WhatsApp. Facebook’s WhatsApp is set to start getting advertising soon, starting with the iOS version of the app. That’s not official, that’s based on a couple of reports — one of which is from WABetaInfo, which has been quite good at spotting what’s coming down the road for the messaging service. https://twitter.com/WABetaInfo/status/1045348771494862849 It seems that Facebook will be…

We’re getting more and more used to streaming our content — whether it’s video files from a media server or music and video from Spotify and Netflix. The next target is gaming, obviously, and while there are solutions out there — like not-available-in-SA PlayStation Now — Google’s got a slightly different idea called Project Stream. Project Stream is a streaming technology that allows for games, which might normally require a console or a dedicated PC, to be streamed through a web browser. The Chrome web browser, specifically, because this is Google’s test, after all. And what a test it’s set…

Other e-reader company Kobo leaked its own Forma device over the weekend We've seen loads of companies do it -- even Samsung and the mighty Apple have been guilty of it from time to time so Kobo probably shouldn't feel bad. Kobo's Spain Twitter account jumped the gun and posted an image of an unannounced

Elon Musk has reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the States regarding charges of securities fraud brought against him by it. Tesla was also charged with “failing to have the required disclosure controls and procedures relating to Musk’s tweets”. The settlement means that Elon Musk will be stepping down as Tesla’s chairman, though he will remain the company’s CEO, and Tesla will be appointing additional independent directors. In addition, Musk and Tesla have agreed to pay $40 million in penalties. In case you’ve been buried under rubble for the past few months, Musk was in…

It’s that time again, when folks who are very fond of games batten down the hatches and spend a whole lot of time in the comfiest chair they can find. While never, ever leaving the house for anything. Usually game releases peak at the end of October but this year’s release lists are packed from start to finish — it’s no wonder everyone has started early. The hardest part of this jam-packed October 2018 was picking just five games that we absolutely have to play. We reckon we’ve made the right choices across the board though, with any one of…