Author: Brett Venter

The pandemic lockdown was a very good time for Zoom (and other online meeting apps and services). Now? Less so. Zoom Docs is the platform’s latest bid to hold your online attention during a time when face-to-face is increasingly preferred. Consulting the Zoom Docs Everyone remembers the eponymous Zoom meeting from just a few years back but we’re all spending less time in front of webcams in 2023. Zoom Docs hopes to reignite this tendency for the company by offering similar functionality to that offered by Google Docs or Microsoft’s suite of collaboration tools. Since it’s 2023, there’s also some…

Samsung’s Galaxy FE lineup, otherwise known as the brand’s Fan Edition kit, has just gained three new members. An image leak late last month dropped some of the details, as well as official imagery, but the new announcement gives out all of the details of the new product lineup. What’s most remarkable about the announcement is the lack of fanfare. Samsung typically makes some sort of noise but this reveal was confined to a press release published on its own website and a brief YouTube overview of the Galaxy FE versions of the S23, Tab 9, and the new Buds…

Say what you like about Elon Musk, and folks frequently do, but the man is an inspiration. No, not like that. TikTok is considering a subscription charge for its services and now Meta is doing the same. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta intends to test-drive a plan that’ll let users in the European Union choose a monthly payment to get rid of ads on both Facebook and Instagram. The amount being considered for mobile users is a not-insubstantial R270, or around $14. Only, it’s in Euros, because of a little thing called the Maastricht Treaty. Developing the Meta…

That OnLeaks fellow is back at it again, dropping images of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus smartphones at not one but two different venues. Images of the S24 Ultra are also out and about but they show a smartphone that looks mostly similar to this year’s effort. Based on the image leaks, the smaller handsets are in for a bit of a redesign. Rather than the colour-matched and rounded edges we’ve become used to, the images of the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus show a new, flat titanium edge that’ll immediately bring to mind Apple’s iPhone design over…

There’s a brand new issue of Stuff, if not on the horizon then out on the shelves of your favourite retailer. The Oct-Nov 2023 issue of South Africa’s best tech magazine is packed to the eyeballs with ways for you to get better at everything. We really do mean everything, with topics like productivity, home theatre (which you really should check out while the Rugby World Cup is ongoing), and more turning up on the list.  One skill that’s always useful is the ability to travel light. Airlines love to charge for extra weight, which means every gram saved equals…

You have exactly one guess as to where the Archax robot mech originates from. If you said anything other than ‘Japan’ then we’re sorely disappointed that you haven’t been keeping up with your mecha anime. But we’re also proud of you for that, so it balances out. Of course Japan would be attempting to actually build a working mech. It’s not the first time that country has given it a shot but the Archax, the product of a startup called Tsubame Industries, is considerably more expensive than the Kuratas, which was on sale on Amazon. Archax enemy This 4.5-metre-tall robot…

It’s been so long since the Charge 5 launched that the newly announced Fitbit Charge 6 has a whole lot more Google inside it than was previously the case. That’s because, in the intervening time, Google completed its assimilation of the fitness tracker company. Long story short, there’s a new member of the Charge family. Unusually, if you’ve been doing this for a while, the announcement turned up on Google’s website rather than, say, Fitbit’s. It also appears there but it’s just a little weird to see Google taking the lead. Google’s Charge 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbLmKWsaCvI Since this is a Fitbit…

Is everything okay in Canada? It seems that streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ love to start implementing new and possibly unpleasant policies there. It can’t be alphabetical, or these changes would all start in Afghanistan. Is it perhaps because the population is famously polite? Either way, guess where Disney+ has chosen to begin its password-sharing limitations? If you guessed anything other than ‘Canada’ then you might want to get some money back from your high school English teacher for failing to teach you basic reading comprehension. The new policy will launch in that country on 1 November following Netflix…

It’s not often that a smartphone manages to do something visually striking. When it does, as is the case with the Huawei Nova 11 Pro, it’s worth paying closer attention to. As with most things, this may or may not be a good thing. In the case of Samsung’s ill-fated Galaxy K Zoom, ‘visually striking’ didn’t equal ‘functionally useful’ (and it really should have). Here, Huawei’s gone for impressive looks without worrying about making it somehow more than just a pretty face. It works, if for no other reason than it’ll have folks looking twice at the mini-computer you’ve just…

You probably thought that the metaverse was dead but the newly-announced Meta Quest 3 has proved that you’re… perhaps not wrong but you’re also certainly not right. Not yet, at any rate. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has taken yet another crack at cracking the virtual reality market with an upgraded sequel to the Oculus Meta Quest 2. Best of all, it does this at a lower price point than the massively overpriced Meta Quest Pro. Local pricing isn’t available yet because, as usual, the hardware isn’t coming into the country through any of Meta’s own channels. The overseas pre-order pricing of…