Author: Brett Venter

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 is the South Korean company’s latest attempt at dominating the global folding smartphone market, and, if previous performance was anything to go by, we expected good things from the new entry. Not surprising things, but certainly good ones. There are a few standout changes here — better cameras, a thinner profile, and lighter weight. There’s also supposed to be a strength increase, something we’re not comfortable testing to destruction since Samsung takes its phones back when we’re done with reviews. We’ll take their word on the titanium lattice structure’s chops, but we’d be lying if…

South Africans love their durable smartphones, and Oukitel has a few stunning examples of those. The newest is the Oukitel WP210, a 6.7in rugged monster of a device that should power you through several days of use while not skimping on other features. A launch date has not been confirmed yet, according to GSMArena, and we’ve checked the official website to find that there’s no listing for the device either. But current images and details seem to be spot on and official enough to take the Oukitel WP210’s existence seriously. Oukitel WP210, reporting for duty The WP210’s 6.7in display is…

No matter what you might use Reddit for at the moment, you’re likely to see changes coming to the platform in the coming months. CEO Steve Huffman, speaking during the company’s latest earnings call, has said that the website will expand its role as a search engine. The mechanism the company will use for this is a combination of its Answers offering and large language model (LLM) integration. It makes a kind of sense — the website’s users often share specific information about queries pertinent to a particular subreddit, be it gaming, tech support, or how to wash a pair…

If your company isn’t crowing about AI in 2025, investors aren’t interested in looking at you. That could be why Uber Eats has announced that it will include artificial intelligence features in its app. Don’t get too dismayed — the features aren’t for you. Yet. Instead, restaurants and other sellers on the app will have an AI suite in the backend to help them “analyze customer reviews, auto-fill menu descriptions, and enhance food photos.” You know, stuff you can do already without setting fire to the planet. Uber Eats at the AI trough The new AI features will let food…

Microsoft has surpassed the $4 trillion (R73.2 trillion) mark for its company value, following closely behind Nvidia, which was the first publicly traded company to achieve this milestone. The achievement was made following the company’s latest earnings report, which drove shares in the company up by as much as 8% before stabilising at a 4.5% increase. Microsoft after AI The stock market responded to Microsoft’s earnings report, particularly claims that sales for its Azure cloud computing services were climbing and details about the number of Copilot users. The company claims to have more than 100 million users at present, though…

Showrunner, a new service that has just entered its alpha testing phase, claims to do what all those artificial intelligence fanboys reckon the technology would: let users create entertainment for themselves, via a prompt (or a collection of them). Variety reports that fledgling startup Fable, headed by Edward Saatchi and partially funded by Amazon (though the amount of funding isn’t disclosed), will conduct an initial test of the service with 10,000 users. It’s not as simple as banging in your specifications and popping out a novel show — a function many users would immediately use to make pornography. Who’s the…

Skild AI, a company backed by Amazon and Japan’s SoftBank, has unveiled Skild Brain, “a unified, omni-bodied brain to control any robot for any task.” It’s being touted as AI-driven, but that’s to be expected in 2025. A few years back, it would have fallen under the banner of machine learning. Still, the concept is a cool one. Rather than focusing on a single robot’s functions, Skild AI’s software is an “omni-bodied foundation model, which can work on quadrupeds, humanoids, table-top, mobile manipulators, and more.” The idea of a unified robotics operating system has its attractions, since robots presently come…

What are robot vacuum cleaners but little drones that scuttle around on the floor? That seems to be the thinking at DJI, which teased a little guy called Romo — the company’s first robot vacuum. There’s little to go on besides the teaser image (above) and the time for the full announcement, but a few aspects are apparent right off the bat. We’ll have full details next week on 6 August, when DJI will unveil the Romo in its entirety at 20h00 in its native country. The announcement should be visible here in South Africa at 14h00 on 6 August.…

Operating under a budget is never fun. It often means being cut off from device features that folks with fatter wallets take for granted. Local brand Orion’s BlackWave BTH-200 over-ear headphones offer at least a few upgrades on your typical set of super-cheap headphones, while retaining the ‘super-cheap’ designation. How cheap? How does R400 a set grab you? If you happen to subscribe to Pepkor’s +More service, that price drops to a frankly bonkers R180. Either price is great, but the lower one will ask you to part with (and agree to share) your information. Four hundred bucks? If you’re…

Jack Dorsey is busy learning new skills, with two recent app launches appearing on TestFlight. One of these, Bitchat, has made the jump from test environment to the full-on App Store, making it available for loads of Apple users. The app has undergone a slight name change, perhaps because of how its title could be interpreted. Now known as Bitchat Mesh, the app can be downloaded for iPhones, Macs, and iPads, with installation even possible on the Apple Vision Pro. Bitchat work As for why you might download the app, that was clearly spelt out during Dorsey’s TestFlight phase. Bitchat…