Valve has made the specifications for its Steam Machine prototypes, 300 of which will be shipping to beta testers at some point later this year, official. Steam has announced a varied set of machines, all of which are designed for some serious gaming. All of the living room rigs will be sharing the same form factor, measuring 12 x 12.4 x 2.9 inches (30.5 x 31.5 x 9.9cm) and each of them will feature a 450w 80Plus Gold power supply. Also in common are the storage and system memory specs. Steam’s Machines will run 1TB/8TB hybrid SSHD configurations along with 16GB…
Author: Brett Venter
At last, it’s cloudy with a chance of competition in a changed world where customers want data. When Vodacom finishes buying Neotel, SA might finally have SNO for Christmas. It’s an old joke from the days when the so-called second network operator (SNO) was announced, oh, somewhere in the mists of time, or 2003. This fixed-line competitor to Telkom was supposed to provide competition in landlines. The SNO gag appeared in countless headlines – “no SNO for Christmas” was the favourite – and somehow represented the abortive process in which Neotel was formed, using the telecom assets of Transnet. The…
If there’s one way to get people to pay attention to your blenders, it would be to throw smartphones into them and reduce them to powder. Blendtec does this on a regular basis and their latest effort pits a collection of iPhone 5c handsets against a single iPhone 5s. The gold one, that is. Catch the video above to see all of the new Apple handsets utterly destroyed. In slow motion.
Local mobile operator Cell C has announced the start of a new campaign and competition aimed at the customers who have shown large amounts of support for the company. The initiative is called Believe and no, it’s not affiliated with a certain Canadian pop singer. Part of the campaign is a series of new television, radio and print ads. The TV commercial, which is central to the Believe campaign, features former Miss South Africas Bokang Montjane and Melinda Bam, along with celebrity presenter Jeanie D. The three women will be acting as brand ambassadors for the mobile operator. Cell C CEO Jose…
South African mobile operator Telkom Mobile has introduced a new promotional contract off which they are billing as the country’s “only Completely Unlimited package”. Called, oddly enough, Completely Unlimited, those on Telkom Mobile’s contract will be able to make unlimited calls to all networks including fixed line numbers (international, premium and VIOP excluded), send unlimited SMSes and will have access to unlimited data. If you think that this sort of promotion, which runs for an unspecified time, is going to be a little pricey then you’d be correct. Telkom has set a base price for the contract at R1,200 per…
Could we be on the way to the advent of the laser rifle? British company TWI may have taken a step in that direction by repurposing an automated 5kW laser cutter by adding a grip to the tool and handing it to a human operator. The operator is protected by a collection of inner and outer garb but the real highlight is seeing someone slicing through metal by hand. If it were the Stuff team, there would be interesting shapes being sliced into steel before any actual work got done. TWI’s innovation is intended for nuclear decommissioning but surely someone…
An Alcatel smartphone is something of a rarity at the Stuff offices but while the recently-arrived OneTouch Star wasn’t able to set the staffers abuzz it also isn’t something that can be written off as a bad investment. It just depends on who is doing the investing. The OneTouch Star comes across as a beginner’s smartphone, a device that will be overlooked by anyone who has previously had their hands on some top-flight Android hardware. Once you’ve experienced a full-featured Android OS, there isn’t any going back. Just sideways, to either iOS, BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone 8. But, there…