Author: Brett Venter

We hope you weren’t especially attached to the Fitbit brand. According to a report from TechCentral, the wearable brand is leaving South Africa. The call comes shortly after the company was bought by Google and is the result of the same policy that prevents you from buying a Pixel smartphone in SA with ease. Uhhh… Google doesn’t feel like it. That’s not exactly how the company put it in a statement confirming the wearable tech brand’s departure. The company has made the move “…to align our hardware portfolio to map closer to Pixel’s regional availability”. That also means that Nest…

Ford, the auto manufacturer, is celebrating 100 years in South Africa this month. At a celebration event at the Silverton manufacturing plant in Pretoria today, the company announced that it would begin production of a new type of Ranger in 2024 – a plug-in hybrid. Can you af-Ford one? Since production has yet to start, Ford hasn’t given out any pricing but expect them to be a little more costly than a stock Ranger. It’ll have a 2.3 litre EcoBoost engine alongside its EV components but the company reckons that you’ll be able to drive it in full EV mode.…

Transportation app Uber has marked its ten-year anniversary in South Africa by launching Uber Package. The service intends to offer same-day deliveries in the country using electrified bikes. Two of them, in fact. There won’t just be two bikes, obviously. You won’t get your package if there are two new drivers. Uber will launch two types of battery-powered scooters in SA, starting in Cape Town this year. Uber bikes The new bikes are differentiated by their batteries. Okay, fine, they also look different and have different ranges (and speeds). One is rated as medium speed and, with a 1.5kW battery…

If ever there was a place we didn’t want to see AI unleashed it would be YouTube’s comments section. Google’s video-sharing platform is well known for having a chaotic environment where folks will comment on the video they’re watching (while casting aspersions on other commentators). Do we really need AI to explain what’s going on in there? Turns out, the answer to that is ‘yes’. Google is conducting a small-scale experiment with some of its YouTube Premium subscribers that will net them an AI assistant devoted to navigating the vast world of YouTube more effectively. And yes, that includes the…

Launching a new streaming service is hard. Doing so by taking an existing name and adding a ‘+’ is even harder. NASA’s NASA+ service, due to go live later this week, will hopefully sidestep some of the challenges experienced by other services that expect you to pay for them. That’s right. The American space agency is launching its service without asking you for money. It also won’t be dumping ads in front of your face to make up for that, either. It’ll just be free. NASA+ is the one? We launch more than rockets. This month, we launch our new…

It’s time to decide how much you really need a new M3 MacBook Pro for work. Local pricing is available and pre-orders are live. Even if you get in on the ground floor, you can expect to spend at least R37,500 for one of Apple’s latest machines. The worst part? That price won’t even get you the new Space Black colourway. Pricing for the new M3 24in iMac is also out and about. It starts at R33,800 and goes as high as R44,300. That’s less a testament to the machine’s affordability and more an indication of the lack of customisation…

One of the main things you need to be if you work in space is mentally stable. That’s at least partially the reason why HTC, sometimes purveyor of Android smartphones and maker of virtual reality hardware, is partnering up with a company called XRHealth to send VR hardware into space. XRHealth, here on terra firma, specialises in mental health (and even physical therapy) applications that are assisted by the judicious usage of virtual reality experiences. And it’s time for those experiences to be experienced off-planet. Well, in orbit, which is close enough. Enough space for HTC? There is a third…

LinkedIn, the social network for people who don’t feel like discussing anything other than work, is the newest online gathering point to reach a billion users. Microsoft made the announcement earlier this week while also saying that there’s yet more artificial intelligence in the platform’s future. But AI, that new and shiny object, isn’t easy or cheap to set up and operate so it’ll be reserved for LinkedIn Premium subscribers. Since a Premium sub will set you back at least R450/m, what Microsoft has in the pipe had better be good. Artificially LinkedIn The new AI tool, like most of…

As surely as one number follows another, Jabra was bound to release another contender in its Elite Active range. The Elite 8 Active is the direct successor to the company’s Elite 7 Active (told you). The new ‘buds keep the overall design of its immediate predecessor but have made improvements both inside and out. We’re not going to call them unkillable but Jabra goes to great lengths to punt their durability. We’ve spent a couple of weeks with these R3,500 in-ears and the brand might well make Samsung and Sony nervous with its combination of (relative) affordability, features, and audio…

The Realme C51 smartphone has just landed in South Africa and is yet another Chinese smartphone out for our lucrative (and crowded) budget smartphone market. This one starts at R4,000 and hopes to justify the expense with a substantial camera, battery, and a fair crop of other specs. Don’t be too worried if you haven’t heard much about Realme. You can think of it as a brand like Redmi or Honor (or Poco). It started life as a subdivision of Oppo but has since gone on to do its own thing (while still being owned by Oppo). This is the…