Author: Brett Venter

UPDATE 28/8/24 – South Africa will get Sony’s WF-C510 wireless buds in all available colourways — blue, yellow, black, and white — in November this year. Pricing will be announced later. Sony’s recent bout of budget releases has turned up some very interesting sets of headphones but its new WF-C510 wireless buds could well be the best of the lot. The newly announced in-ears are set to be extremely affordable but with features that belie their price point. The new in-ears will replace Sony’s WF-C500 budget beater (currently on sale for about a thousand bucks) but will offer more advanced…

Nobody will ever accuse certain companies of spending too much time on a product name. iClever is one of these, with its Kid’s Bluetooth Headphones BTH18 being a particularly clunky example. As you can tell from the name, these are headphones… designed for kids. Kids as young as three and as old as fifteen, though these LED-fitted cans are aimed at the younger end of the spectrum. iClever is a Chinese brand so you might think that you’ll have trouble laying hands on these. As it happens, they’re sold via Amazon (in the US). The price, including shipping and customs…

Samsung’s range of folding smartphones has hit a wall when it comes to design. Each iteration of the Fold and Flip series seems only grudgingly incremented. Whether this is a lack of imagination or a limitation on what can be done with a smartphone (it’s not a lack of imagination), the result is the same. Or is it? Samsung has been confirmed to be working on something a little different for its folding smartphone lineup. A so-called “double-folding” smartphone is in development at the company, according to executive Chung Yi. Samsung doubles up Yi was speaking at last week’s International…

Samsung’s Galaxy Ring wearable isn’t coming to South Africa — at least, not this iteration — and that might be a blessing in disguise. The folks at iFixit laid hands on the wearable tech and took it apart. As it happens, that’s a one-way operation. iFixit is known for… well, fixing things but also for taking tech apart to see how much of a pain it would be to repair. Samsung’s newest product is right up there, being ranked as ” 100% disposable”, a trait it shares with Samsung’s new style Galaxy Buds 3. Exploring the Galaxy Ring The major…

If seeing a humanoid robot getting in some bodyweight exercises doesn’t get you off the couch, maybe you deserve to be robot fodder when the uprising comes. Boston Dynamics has shared a new video of its revamped Atlas robot showcasing its new agility and strength. If you recall, the older version was fairly nimble but also something of a clunker. The recently revealed second-generation robot has a much slimmer build and altogether more versatility in its movement, which the short clip emphasises very well. Boston Dynamics Gym https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKgHe_CcUWY As Boston Dynamics videos go, it’s not especially long or complicated but…

Facebook parent Meta is well-known for liberally ‘borrowing’ features for Instagram and its other apps, relentlessly copying anything popular in the hope of scooping up more user data. It seems that new apps aren’t innovating fast enough so now Instagram has taken to plundering obsolete platforms. The image-sharing influencer and sales app is rolling out the ability for users to embed a specific song in their bio. If you’ve been around long enough, you might remember that as a key feature of social media precursor MySpace. But, of course, Zuckerberg’s platform will do things a little differently. Sounds like Instagram…

The private spacewalk that is the sexiest feature of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission, being facilitated by SpaceX and a billionaire (not that one), looks set to go ahead on 27 August 2024. When the time comes, some (or all) of the crew will step outside of the capsule. It’s a scary thing to imagine at any time and we’d suspect it’s even scarier to do. Especially if you’re not sure exactly what this operation entails. SpaceX has just shown what will be expected of the astronauts when they enter orbit further out than any human beings since the Apollo…

One of the more annoying things about astronomy is the amount of learning involved before taking part. It’s not just optical systems but cameras and atmospheric conditions to contend with too. Beaverlab’s Finder TW2, a fully crowdfunded (but not yet properly on-sale) telescope hopes to sidestep all of that by doing all the thinking for its users. It’ll do this mostly by exploiting the buzziest of 2024’s buzzwords — artificial intelligence. Oh, all right, and some fairly advanced hardware designed to take one of the most common (and versatile) telescope designs and make it a) more versatile and b) vastly…

It was just a few short months ago when speculation about what would happen to the Apple engineers formerly working on Project Titan (the long-rumoured Apple car). Since the project was shut down,  some of them have reportedly shifted to robotics. Now we may have some idea what some of these engineers have been working on. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who was also the source of the Project-Titan-to-robotics news, reckons the iPhone maker has an all-new product in the works. Yes, robotic components are involved. No, it’s not what you think it is. Apple knows how to pick ’em Rather than…

Samsung’s Odyssey monitors are generally excellent pieces of gaming hardware, even if some iterations have proved too… enthusiastic. But there’s always room for one more feature and that feature has just turned up from the South Korean company at Gamescom. Samsung used the German gaming convention to announce its new Odyssey 3D gaming monitor. If the title isn’t a complete giveaway, it’s a screen with 3D capabilities. Not the sort that requires special glasses, either. No, this is glasses-free 3D. The Odyssey (in 3D) Samsung isn’t the first to leap onto this particular bandwagon. Acer and Asus have already released…