Author: Brett Venter

2019 Is fast looking like the year of the folding smartphone. Samsung’s got something in store, Xiaomi’s putting their efforts in front of faces sometime this year and Huawei’s also going to be joining the party. The Chinese company has announced its own pre-Mobile World Congress event for 24 February, just a few days after Samsung’s own reveal event. What can we expect to see at Huawei’s event? The company’s folding phone, according to Android Police. The website spoke to Huawei’s Consumer Business Group CEO Richard Yu a short while ago, who said, “We look forward to seeing you in…

Nintendo’s list of games aimed at mobile phone users continues to grow. The newest addition to the stable — or perhaps the medical centre in this case — is Dr. Mario World, an action puzzler based around the company’s mascot, this time clad in a lab coat. The Japanese games maker says that there’s an ‘early summer’ release planned, meaning we should see it here a little before mid-year (you know, our winter). And we might actually see this Android and iOS release at launch, since the rollout is global. Kinda. Nintendo’s Dr. Mario World appointment is penciled in for…

Every year we get a new iPhone. Well, every year Apple releases a new iPhone. You can get it, if you want or if budget allows. But every year we also get a price increase for said iPhone, a phenomenon that prompted Apple to start releasing explicitly cheaper editions of their mobile phone. But, if Apple’s Tim Cook is to be believed, we could experience something strange soon. The price of an iPhone either staying static or, amazingly, coming down. Speaking to Reuters, Cook acknowledged that in some markets — where the local currency is weak against the dollar –…

Smartphones are, when you actually think about it, just little pocket-sized computers. The fact that they can make phone calls is a holdover from the days when having a phone in your car made you super-cool (or a Wall Street broker with some unusual items in your gym locker). And, like computers, smartphones constantly upgrade to faster processors, more RAM and better storage. Samsung’s been helping with that last bit in particular, and has started producing its first 1-terabyte (TB) embedded Universal Flash Storage  (eUFS) option for mobile devices. Gee, we wonder how high storage on the Galaxy S10 is…

Once upon a time, a budget Android smartphone wasn’t a very nice thing to look at. Made to conform to a price point rather than to attract customers, cheaper Androids were typically poorly-designed, slow, and difficult to use. Once upon a time. Xiaomi’s newly-announced Redmi Go, the company’s first Android Go smartphone, is hoping to change your mind on that score. The Redmi Go uses Google’s stripped back Android OS, designed for lower resource phones, but — on paper, at least — the Redmi device isn’t bad as entry-level devices go. A bit of everything The new budget phone is…

A bug was discovered in Apple’s FaceTime services yesterday evening and news of its existence has rocketed around the world. The bug allows members of a group FaceTime call to eavesdrop on what’s happening with other users — before those users have answered or even if they’ve declined the call. The bug is so easy to replicate for users of iOS 12.1 that Apple has taken group FaceTime offline for now while they work on a fix.

It’s only been a few short months since Apple’s last iPad announcement, and even shorter since they were launched here in SA, but we may be in for another iPad reveal soon. One consisting of four new iPads (well, possibly just one or two variants) and even a new, 7th-generation iPod Touch. The folks over at MacRumours first reported on the handful of iOS 12.2 beta references revealing the existence of four new iPads. The references were found by developer Steven Troughton-Smith and detail new iPads (iPad 11,1 though to iPad 11,4). Two of the devices appear cellular and the others WiFi-based. A mention…

Samsung will substitute plastic packaging for something a bit more sustainable Samsung has a plan to save (some of) the world. The South Korean tech giant announced that it'll be ditching the plastic that it used to package smartphones... and everything else. So fridges, TVs, pretty much everything with a Samsung label will get more

We recently got a chance to go hands-on with Far Cry: New Dawn, the newest ‘in-between’ release dividing the numbered Far Cry games. After Far Cry 3 we got the neon Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, after Far Cry 4 we got Far Cry Primal and after Far Cry 5 we have Far Cry: New Dawn. What’s strange about this one is that it’s a more-or-less direct sequel to Far Cry 5, rather than being an only tenuously-connected asset rebuild. Taking place seventeen years after the so-called ‘good’ ending of Far Cry 5 [SPOILERS: The nuclear bombs actually go off and…

Video games are big business. Not quite as big as Apple in a bad quarter but still pretty big for what’s still a fairly narrow form of entertainment. American market research firm the NPD Group has crunched the numbers and video games sales managed to rack up $43.4 billion in 2018. That’s about R600 billion here at home. That’s a whole lot of video games. Those sales numbers aren’t exclusively software, though. Hardware, which includes consoles and peripherals, accounted for $7.5 billion in sales (R104 billion), while software accounted for the remaining $35.8 billion (R500 billion or so). These totals…