Author: Brett Venter

Samsung has released details of its newest foldable smartphones, with the Galaxy Fold 7 (barring any surprises) emerging as the device to own if you’re all about performance. Featuring Samsung’s latest custom-specced Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, its massive 200MP main camera, and the thinnest folded profile in a Fold yet, it’s the Samsung to own if it absolutely has to fold (and still function afterwards). Bigger screen, skinnier body Samsung may have taken the thinner folding smartrphones personally, since its Fold 7 is the thinnest phone it has designed to date. It measures just 8.9mm when folded down, an impressive…

Opel owner Stellantis unveiled the new Opel GrandLand SUV at an event in Johannesburg today. The model heading to South African showrooms starts at a wallet-straining R790,000 — not exactly an entry-level family car, but how many of those boast a 16in passenger touchscreen? The GrandLand wasn’t all Stellantis had on the agenda, sharing its roadmap for the country and the continent across all of its vehicle brands while teasing other news yet to come. The most notable? Chinese EV brand Leapmotor is set to enter the South African market under Stellantis’ aegis in September this year.  It wasn’t entirely…

Samsung may (or may not) reveal a tri-folding smartphone this evening, but Chinese brand Tecno has teased its own version. Called the Phantom Ultimate G Fold Concept (they even nicked Samsung’s rumoured G Fold moniker), it’s expected to launch in the next couple of weeks. Details of the Chinese company’s handset are thin on the ground. The company has teased the handset, but hasn’t deigned to go into the specs. What we have to go on are a few images leaked from a hands-on with the device, and it looks… pretty much what we’d expect from Samsung’s rumoured device. Tecno…

Chinese online shopping portal Temu has brought a physical warehouse to South Africa, allowing for quicker delivery of some products to local customers. Products stocked locally will be marked “local” and will feature delivery times of two days or less. The company follows Amazon’s example (though much faster, given that the service only launched in SA some eighteen months ago) by bringing its products closer to our market. Shorter time to Temu What isn’t certain is how pricing will alter for purchases made from the local Temu depot. Current pricing takes advantage of South African import rules to offer sometimes…

It was bound to happen, though the full leak of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 7, Flip 7, and Flip 7 FE turned up a bit sooner than we expected. Samsung has several phones expected for tomorrow night’s Unpacked, plus (possibly) something very unusual. Three out of (maybe) four have had their reveals spoiled. If, obviously, the leaks via Roland Quandt on Bluesky are true. They come in the form of a simple graphic comparing the three handsets. While they don’t go down to granular detail, there’s enough present for us to know what to expect from the new Fold and friends.…

Samsung has just acquired a new company that will allow it to provide deeper healthcare services to its customer base. The company announced its acquisition of Xealth, a medical services provider that offers “diverse digital health tools and care programs”. The idea is to use Xealth’s presence across more than 500 American hospitals to help “unify fragmented health information and to empower individuals to take control of their own health”. Samsung’s range of wearables will be instrumental in making this happen. Samsung has Xealth in mind It’s not exactly surprising, given that the South Korean company has previously launched a…

Google’s Gemini AI has started interacting with your third-party apps, opening the door for the search company to “[f]ind relevant information” and “perform actions for you” based on those apps. Of course, Google hasn’t made it an opt-in thing. There are reasons for this, the most likely being that you can be claimed as an active Gemini user simply by using your device as you normally would. That looks good on monthly user figures, which helps justify all the AI spending the company is doing. Just like a Gemini The company recently shared an email explaining what the new integration…

If you’ve ever wanted to decentralise your messaging, Jack Dorsey’s new Bitchat app might be just what you’re looking for. The Twitter co-founder announced the app, the product of a weekend spent learning “about bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things,” is currently available via TestFlight for iOS users. Or, at least, it was. The beta has since been filled, but that bodes well for an eventual release of Bitchat, once it’s been in development for more than a handful of days. There’s no timeline on when (or if) this…

We saw right through Sony’s attempts to keep its WF-C710N buds a secret earlier this year, and now we can see right through the case of the review unit the company dispatched to us recently. The successors to the Sony C700N buds are, at R3,000, still firmly in the budget bracket for in-ear headphones, but still manage impressive audio quite out of keeping with their price tag. The previous buds were like that, too. So what’s keeping us from recommending the older model that now retails for R2,300 over the newer, slightly pricier C710N? It’s not just because there’s an…

Samsung is expected to unveil its new Fold and Flip 7 models at next week’s Unpacked, but there could well be something more remarkable waiting in the wings. There’s talk of a new Samsung tri-fold smartphone coming up, and the folks at Android Authority have located references and images of it in the latest OneUI 8 build. That Samsung is making one is almost a given. Huawei recently released its Mate XT tri-fold smartphone in a few new markets, including South Africa, and the South Korean company isn’t one to let an affront like that stand. The files located in…