Author: Brett Venter

The Stuff April-May 2025 issue has hit digital and physical shelves around South Africa, and as usual, it’s jammed with all of the latest tech to hit the planet since the last time we did that. That wasn’t that long ago, but much new has turned up. Bike GPS units, dashboard cameras, sleep masks, and GameCube controllers are just a small (and weird) sample of what awaits readers in this stacked issue of Stuff.  The April-May 2024 main event is Stuff’s headphone buyers guide. Covering every use case from the best all-rounders to audio specialists, wired headphones to the kind…

Doom, like many things that were taken seriously in 1993, has become a meme. It went from a semi-evil (1993, remember?) first-person shooter that revolutionised the game genre to what it is today: a curiosity that developers and hackers try to get running on anything possible. And now there’s one more — a special boxed edition of the game. Doom and Doom II: Will It Run Edition is a very limited-run physical version of the 1993/1994 iD Software being released, appropriately enough, by Limited Run Games. In keeping with the game’s theme, there will be 666 boxed copies of the…

Vivo’s X200 Ultra, the upgrade on the already substantial X200 Pro, is set for launch in China shortly. It’s justifying the name — and the attendant price increase — by creating and releasing something called a Photography Kit. As the name suggests, the collection of peripheral bits will turn Vivo’s new high-end smartphone into something more like a camera. One of these bits is an external zoom lens that ratchets up the phone’s optical zoom from 3.7x to 8.7x. One X200 Ultra, and make it snappy The add-on was revealed by the company in a post to Chinese social media…

How do you touch something that doesn’t exist? That’s a question Reddit-bound anime fans have asked for years, but it’s also a serious consideration for folks developing hologram technology. Minority Report might be a privacy nightmare scenario but the touch interface Tom Cruise uses in the film is undeniably cool. Wouldn’t it be awesome if it were real? Well, it’s not. But FlexiVol, a hologram manipulation method created by researchers at Universidad Pública de Navarra (the Public University of Navarra in Spain), comes close. There are a few caveats at this point. The technology has only just been presented in…

Unitree’s quadruped robots are frequently put to interesting uses — beach cleanup and er… flamethrowers come to mind — so perhaps we should be worried that it’s teaching its G1 humanoid robot to fight. After all, we’re expecting a Machine War™ at some point. If it’s fought with gloves in an actual boxing ring, the apocalypse might not be so bad. The robotics manufacturer dropped a brief teaser video (below) to hype up its longer showing of “robot combat” in the next month or so. It features what looks like the Unitree G1 robot going head to head with both…

The UK government is working on a “murder prediction” tool that will use the personal data collected about that country’s residents to divine who is most likely to commit murder. Before they do it, obviously. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the whole point of Minority Report, the film based on Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report. If you never saw (or read) that one, it deals with so-called ‘pre-crime’, through a justice system that captures and penalises people before any crime takes place. Anarchy in the UK? Instead of enslaved telepaths, the UK’s system uses data collected from…

Samsung has unveiled its raft of new TVs for 2025. Among these is an upgrade on one of its oddest displays. The Frame Pro is a reworking of the Frame, a disguised TV that spends its off-time impersonating famous artwork (as long as you’re willing to pay a fee). Otherwise, it’ll display lesser-known works with equal élan. The Frame Pro also introduces a pricing structure in keeping with an expensive bit of wall-mounted art. This is partly because of the panel upgrade and partly because it only arrives in larger sizes. The 65in version starts at $2,100 (R40,800 — expect…

There are few better ways to show off just how much money you have than by tooling around in one of Mercedes’ G-Class off-road vehicles. If you’re keen to ratchet your wealth-based preening up a notch, you can now add an electrified version to your multi-car garage/warehouse. Mercedes-Benz has launched its new G 580 EQ in South Africa. The ‘EQ’ means it drops traditional fuel for EV innards, giving you the bulk of an off-roader with the takeoff speed of a souped-up 250cc motorcycle. G-Class act Okay, so the new G-Class — sometimes affectionately known as the Geländewagen by those…

There isn’t really such a thing as a bad Kindle. We could point fingers at the clumsy-to-use-in-2025 Kindle 4, which lacked a touchscreen or keyboard, but it was still an excellent device for its time. That said, the Kindle Colorsoft has proved to be a non-essential purchase for anyone without a pressing need to a) give Amazon more of their money or b) read PDFs in colour on a 7in screen. The headline feature here, as the device’s title suggests, is the new colour-capable E-ink screen. Unfortunately, this is all that’s really impressive since adding colour is neither useful on…

It’s been a while since the Instax Mini 40’s 2021 launch, and it’s about time Fujifilm named a successor. That camera is the Instax Mini 41, obviously, and it brings along similar stylings and a more compact shape to the ‘high-end’ instant camera from the Japanese house. The Instax Mini 41 launches in Japan on 17 April this year, before heading to other territories at an unspecified time in the future. Pricing is similarly a mystery, both on its home ground and abroad, but everything else about the camera — and its attendant accessories — is known. Mini 41 me…