Here’s something that we haven’t seen in the Stuff offices for a while, a mid-range Sony smartphone. Coming from the Xperia pedigree but lacking that all-important Z suffix is the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. And it’s… surprisingly impressive. But you’d have a hard time telling this mid-range Xperia apart from its beefier relative, from a distance at any rate. It’s a typical black Sony-branded slab and the only way to really distinguish between this and a Z-series is to turn it on and fiddle with it. Even then, it may take you a moment or two. Water Baby The Xperia…
Author: Brett Venter
We’ve often thought of smartphones as little pocket-sized computers, especially considering that they’re a lot more powerful than the PCs the Stuff team started out with back in the day. So we’re quite pleased that Android phones finally have that missing PC piece – Microsoft’s Office software. Microsoft has announced that Android users are able to download Office for their smartphones, with Word, PowerPoint and Excel all being available now (free) on Google’s Play Store – though you’re in for extra features if you sign in with an Office 365 account. That download requirement won’t stick around for long though. Smartphones…
It’s hard to keep a secret when there’s a public beta available, because of all those inconvenient folks who are going to poke around in your code and see what’s coming next. That’s a lesson that Apple’s probably learned by now. Website 9to5Mac have been doing the poking in Apple’s OS X El Capitan beta and they’ve unearthed a couple of interesting things. Among them, a reference to a 4K video resolution (4,096 x 2,304) that is lower than the 5K resolution of the new 27-inch iMac. But… this has sparked speculation that Apple’s got an updated screen coming for…
The only good kill is overkill, especially in the case of gaming notebooks. It’s not for nothing that MSI’s GT80 gaming notebook bears the moniker ‘Titan’. But it didn’t stick, the moment it arrived at the Stuff offices everyone took to calling it The Beast. The capital letters are justified as well, for a selection of reasons. Its size, noise (this is kinda optional) and specs all contribute to its new nickname but mostly it’s the size that got everyone mentioning the Beast. Little did they know how prophetic their assignation of title was to be. Some Kind Of Monster…
If you haven’t already gotten hold of your copy of Batman: Arkham Knight, which was released earlier this week, then listen up. While the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Arkham Knight are getting good to great reviews, the PC version of the Dark Knight’s outings has been pulled from sale due to performance issues. The problems consist of a capped frame rate (at 30fps) but despite this players are still seeing stuttering and frame drop while playing. The hassles appear to stem from a poorly optimised game, rendering it pretty much unplayable on the most powerful platform out…
We’ve seen this before, from Nokia back when they were a thing. LG have announced that they’ve got a new mid-range phone on the market and this one is being aimed at users who are all about the tunes. To that end, LG have made their new Band Play a mid-range handset in the usual sectors but there some improvements in the audio specs department to be had. The stuff we usually look at isn’t all that beefy, there’s a Snapdragon 410 1.2GHz quad core, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage running behind a 5-inch 720 x 1,280 display.…
We’re almost completely hosing ourselves right at those old “You Wouldn’t Steal A Car” anti-piracy adverts that made DVDs and certain movie theatre trips so annoying a while back. Because that got perverted into “You Wouldn’t Download A Car” and oh yes we bloody well would. And the car we would download is the Blade, a supercar from a company called Divergent Microfactories. The frame of the vehicle is made of a collection of 3D printed aluminium ‘Node’ pieces, meaning that most of the car’s metal frame can fit into a (large) kitbag. Connect the Nodes together using printed carbon…
Crime is stupid and risky and I’d make an extremely bad criminal. Not bad as in ‘nasty’, bad as in ‘not good at it’. That’s the lesson that Payday 2: Crimewave Edition on the PlayStation 4 has taught me, anyway. For those uninitiated into the criminal fraternity playing out on PCs and consoles around the world, Payday 2 is a co-op crime simulator. Players get together in teams and steal things. Putting it that way, it sounds pretty easy but Payday 2 is anything but. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong and while this can be somewhat mitigated by…
Wearables, wearables, everywhere and not a stop to think. At least in most games, where companies are releasing wearable trackers just to get themselves in the public eye. Google’s not exempt but they’ve been thinking about their tech and the rest is the newly-announced wearable heath band. It’s not intended for the retail market, Google is instead developing the as-yet unnamed device for use in the medical profession, “…for this to become a medical device that’s prescribed to patients or used for clinical trials” according to Google’s Andy Conrad. The band will be able to keep tabs on your temperature,…
The age of personal transportation that can fly appears to be upon us, though it’s a few decades later than science fiction would have had us believe. Even so, it’s great to see that it’s finally happening. Flying cars are still a ways off, though they’re in testing all over the place, but hoverbikes and hoverboards… those are also coming. A company called Malloy Aeronautics, which is based in the UK, is hoping to build a full-scale hoverbike – along the lines of the speeders from Star Trek, if not quite as streamlined – with a Kickstarter project raising £64,089 (R1.23 million) for…