Author: Brett Venter

It’s no secret that we’ve got some very high hopes for LG’s upcoming G Watch, which may be formally announced at the end of this month. Part is it is based on LG’s recent performance in the smartphone field, the other part is based on excitement for Android Wear in general since the new wearable products announced for Android are looking pretty good so far. LG has released a new promotional video for their upcoming Android Wear addition and while it doesn’t reveal or show anything new, it does give us a nice long look at what will be announced…

LG has announced a new range of G Pad tablets, which will be given their first public airing later this week at the MedPI 2014 trade show that is taking place in Monaco from 13 to 16 May this year. That’s not a whole lot of notice but the company will be detailing the internals at the event. In the meantime, LG has said which sizes users will be getting with the revamped product lineup. A 7-inch, 8-inch and 10.1-inch G Pad are all in the offing, each tablet targeted at a different section of the market. The G Pad 7.0…

Here at the Stuff technology storage and assessment facility, we all firmly believe that headphones need to suited for a purpose. Some are designed for travel, being compact and easy to transport while (ideally) offering enough clarity and noise cancellation to block out the masses that are also making the trip. Others are designed for pure sound enjoyment, with a monster price tag to go along with that perfect sound reproduction on lossless digital audio files. And then there’s gaming, which has a whole different set of requirements. The firetruck red set of cans from Tritton that we were given…

Samsung will no longer be releasing notebooks for the South African market, according to reports. The move has come about as a result of reduced demand for the technology in favour of tablets and other mobile devices, which Samsung has said is more “.. aligned with the evolution of the technology market and the changing end user demands”. Market analysis firms have been marking a decline in the PC and laptop market for some time, with shipments of both falling as tablets and smartphones rise in popularity. ZDNet points to a recent IDC report that says that sales of notebooks…

Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs is fast approaching a release date so of course the preview and teaser content is starting to fly through thick and fast. We’ve already seen some of what the main story will entail and also been given a guided tour of how Watch_Dogs’ multiplayer will work, now it’s time for us to be introduced to some of the supporting characters. Ubisoft have included a wide selection of backup for their upcoming technology-based open-world thriller and we’re quite excited to meet all of them at the end of this month. Hit up the video to get an introduction to…

Nintendo has never had much of a hold on the South African gaming market, which is technically classes as an emerging market as far as most international companies are concerned. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since we’ll probably be on the roster for Nintendo’s new initiative, which is the creation and launch of consoles and gaming hardware for emerging markets. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, speaking in an interview with Bloomberg, has revealed that the company has plans to create all-new hardware for certain markets rather than just repackaging a cheaper version of their existing products and releasing them in…

Meet ADAM, otherwise know as the Area Defense Anti-Munitions laser weapon prototype from Lockheed Martin. We’ve seen a few of these types of weapons demonstrated recently, notably the LaWS system that is due to be deployed on a ship later this year for testing, but Lockheed Martin’s own system isn’t to be sneezed at. ADAM has been successfully used to disable small boats in recent tests, using a high-energy laser to pierce the hull of two boats from a range of 1.6km. The company has released one of the boat test kills (seen in the video above) but they have…

LG has started rolling out a whole new range of smart appliances that are able to “chat”, according to the company. The collection of home assistants, due to launch shortly in South Korean before heading to other regions of the world, will be able to talk to users in a sense using the company’s HomeChat messaging service. HomeChat will feature NLP (Natural Language Processing) and LINE, a messaging app “…to allow users to receive recommendations and control settings when away from home”. Long story short, users will be able to message their appliances and receive a response, given their devices…

MTN has already released a very low-cost Android smartphone in the form of the MTN Steppa but the company in yellow may have to bow out of the race a little early in the face of Vodacom’s new (and very cheap) smartphone. Vodacom has announced the launch of the Vodafone Smart 4 Mini, a 4-inch WVGA device that will run buyers R900 if they buy the smartphone outright. Alternatively, buyers will be able to pick up the smartphone from Vodacom for a base 24 month, R60pm contract that will see them getting R50 airtime every month. But what could a…

Gothenburg in Sweden is the setting for Volvo’s current round of testing of autonomous cars, a project known as ‘Drive Me’. The project will eventually see 100 self-driving vehicles driving around the Swedish city, on a pre-selected collection of roads that total around 50km in length. Volvo’s ‘Drive Me’ initiative has the backing of “legislators, transport authorities, a major city, a vehicle manufacturer and real customers”, according to the company, and this test will be putting Volvo’s experimental vehicles through their paces in a variety of everyday conditions, a lot like Google’s current efforts in Mountain View, California. Volvo says that…