Author: Brett Venter

SpaceX has been lofting things into orbit for some time now, that’s the main reason that the company has a contract to ferry goods to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA but the most recent launch of the CRS-5 Dragon to the ISS was something very special. Not so much the launch itself, though a space launch will always retain a sort of raw power until we can harness clean-burning gravity drives, but what SpaceX was planning to do once the first-stage Falcom rocket disengaged from the main payload. The company has been experimenting with recovering their rockets by…

CES 2015 was the scene of a whole lot of 4K TV reveals, with everyone from Sharp to Sony to LG and Samsung getting in on the UHD act this year. But that still leaves the problem of where to find 4K video content to take advantage of all of those extra pixels. If you are a resident of the States then you have options. Netflix and Amazon will be able to provide a couple of streaming choices and DirecTV and Comcast will also let you display some stuff on your UHD screen in its native resolution. But here’s something…

It’s about time that we checked in on WhatsApp and the number of people using the (now highly) popular messaging service. When last we saw our heroes, they were sitting atop a pile of users 600 million high, so what has changed since August last year? Quite a bit, according to the company. Their monthly users have ballooned once more, jumping up some 100 million for a total of 700 million monthly users. That is, according to a Facebook post by WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum – which is a fitting place to offer an update for the now Facebook-owned service.…

Samsung’ been comping at the bit and trying to get into the commercial virtual reality space ever since Facebook announced that they were buying Oculus Rift, and even before that teeny little purchase took place. The Gear VR, which uses one of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 handsets as a display, is the result of that. Just jumping into VR from a hardware perspective doesn’t make a whole lot of sense though so Samsung’s CES announcement that the company is launching a 360-degree video service called Milk VR isn’t exactly unexpected. Milk VR is set to be part of Samsung’s Milk…

Sony and Microsoft both have their fanboys in the console sphere and it’s a foolish man or woman who wanders into the midst of an online flamewar about the merits of either console. Sony have been attempting to show up the Xbox One with regular releases of the numbers and they’ve just dropped another figure: 18.5 million. That’s the number of PlayStation 4 consoles that have been sold since the new generation of console was launched back at the end of 2013. The total number sold is global, according to Sony, and encompasses all 123 countries that the gaming kit…

There’s a lot going on at CES in Las Vegas this year. A spectacularly huge amount of stuff is being shown off, paraded around and generally pointed in our general direction, making us want all of it. LG’s shown off a few items of specific interest, like the G Flex 2, but they have a lot more to say at their conference than just discussing a curved, self-healing smartphone. Hit up the video link above for the full presentation which covers everything from the Internet of Things, which is on everyone’s lips at CES this year, to TVs (4K and…

It’s the beginning of the year and that’s a pretty good time for predictions about where the tech industry is going to go. Our usual approach involves a crystal ball, a Ouija board and possible a small goat so we tend to leave the speculation to professional speculators, like the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), who have analysts and figures and things that make sense in the real world. And the CEA have said, via their semi-annual The U.S. Consumer Electronics Sales and Forecasts report, that the consumer electronics industry is set to have a bumper year. Though their forecast for…

Here’s a name that we haven’t heard in a while. Polaroid are still out and about and they’ve got a trio of new gadgets headed our way. The set of kit that they’ve got on the way is currently being shown at CES, with some of it being available immediately if you happen to be State-side. Their Socialmatic instant camera, which bears a striking resemblance to the Instagram logo (unsurprisingly) if you get the right colour scheme, is one of these. This little retro shooter boasts a 14MP front sensor and a 2MP rear camera, because of course it does.…

Back in October last year local online retailers Takealot and Kalahari announced their intentions towards each other: they were going to merge since “…combining forces gives us a better chance of success” in the online shopping sphere, Kalahari’s Oliver Rippel said at the time. The joining of these two entities received final approval from the competition authority yesterday, welding them into a single unit that will do as much as it can to siphon money out of your credit card. Not that we’re complaining, they make a lot of cash out of the Stuff folks. Takealot founder and co-CEO Kim…

Lenovo’s X1 Carbon is a brilliant machine, often being the only Windows-sporting notebook to actually give the MacBook Air a run for Stuff’s money. And the race is going to be repeated again in 2015, as the Chinese manufacturer has re-re-refreshed the ThinkPad X1 Carbon again for 2015. And the refresh takes things back a step. 2014’s Carbon featured a clickable trackpad and that upper adaptive row of keys but those weren’t all that useful by the look of things. How do we know (besides having actually used the Carbon)? Well, the 2015 edition is set to dispose of those…