Author: Marcé

Augmented reality might’ve been all the rage a few years ago, but since McDonalds and KFC started distributing AR card games with their kiddies meals, the magic has kind of died. But speaking of magic… Stuff found the below video posted on the LinkedIn profile of the COO of a VR development company. The original link doesn’t seem to be live any more but, when it was, the tagline for the video simply said, “Augmented Reality Puts the Magic in ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Cards.” The footage appears to come from an app created by a company called BigAR, and has…

Cast your mind back to last month and you might recall we gave away a wireless speaker, a Fender Newport to be exact. To enter, readers had to submit their track of choice for testing speakers and headphones. We had more than just a few entries (395 uniques to be exact — and one chap who entered an Enigma song 500 times), and slaved away adding the submissions to a collaborative Spotify playlist. Safe to say we had a few duplicates, a few punts of local artists (which we appreciate — shout out to J. Loops and Lady Zamar, in…

The Nokia 3.1 is, for lack of better words, a ‘real’ Nokia. It looks and feels like the Nokias of old… although we’d need to test if it could survive a tumble down a flight of stairs to be sure, otherwise is it really worthy of the Nokia name? Now owned by a company called HMD Global, Nokia’s back on its smartphone game with the likes of the Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 6.1, and the brand new, notch-touting X6 due later this month. The 3.1 continues the trend of Nokia making quality handsets and then pricing them well below many…

Although the capacity of storage devices has been growing at a tremendous rate, we’re still ecstatic to hear that Samsung is producing 4TB Solid State Drives (SSDs), aimed specifically at consumers. That means us, the normies. Samsung’s new 4-bit SATA SSD will pave the way to massive terabyte-sized hard drives for normal people, which will, in turn, lower the prices… slightly, at least. The SSD’s use 4-bit V-NAND memory tech, which means that more memory is packed into the same space as with the previous 3-bit cells — all while operating at the same speeds. As a result, the new…

OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research firm which is (of course) funded by Elon Musk, created a team of AI Bots designed to jam some Dota 2, and then put said bots up against a group of semi-professional Dota players. The team of bots, called OpenAI Five, took on players ranked in the 99.95th percentile in the world, and beat them 2-1 in a set of three games. The human players included former Dota 2 professionals and casters Merlini, Fogged, Cap, and Blitz. Maybe we’re not the superior gamer species after all? After winning the first two games without breaking out…

In just under a week’s time Samsung will announce the Galaxy Note 9, the next in the almost-infamous phablet line that may or may not explode (it probably won’t). But before Samsung goes all official on us, we’ve got all the dirty inside info for you. Around this time before any launch, we tend to see a range of ‘leaks’ — something that is likely planned by the smartphone makers well in advance — and from these leaks, we often confirm quite a few long-standing rumours. Some are old, and some are new — you decide if it’s all worth…

South Africans will soon have a range of new mobile payment methods to choose from. Earlier this week Absa announced integration with Samsung Pay (with Standard Bank expected to do likewise any day now), and today FNB announced support for Fitbit Pay and Garmin Pay that will work with any contactless enabled point-of-sale device. Apple Pay, where you at? Now anyone with compatible Fitbit and Garmin wearables will be able to make payments without the need for a bank card. How does it work? But Stuff, what sorcery is this you ask? Smartphone and wearable payments already exist in many other…

It’s been a mad week for new payments solutions. We’ve seen Absa roll out a Samsung Pay beta, and FNB launch Fitbit and Garmin Pay, and now Standard Bank has joined the party by announcing new virtual cards to make it easier for anyone to shop online, even if they don’t have a credit card. The bank has also announced that, like Absa, it’ll soon be supporting Samsung Pay. “At the moment, very few South Africans shop online and those that do, tend to use a credit card or only pay cash-on-delivery. Trust, security and control are some of the reasons for…

In may ways, the future’s arrived. We’ve can pay for things with the tap of a smartwatch, cars get over-the-air (OTA) software updates, and the next Tesla Roadster update will turn the centre console into a gaming station that’ll include “a few of the best” (by Elon’s standards, at least) Atari games. Tesla’s fun-oriented electric vehicles (EVs) will receive version 9.0 of Tesla’s infotainment software in coming weeks, which’ll include a ‘party mode’, along with the newly announced Atari games. Mr Musk doesn’t provide a full list of titles, but he indicated that Missile Command, Pole Position and Tempest would…

You probably never think about the Google Clock app on your Android phone. Unless you are one of those annoyingly-happy early riser types it’s not exactly an app that brings you joy, with its annoying chirps or other sounds that, over time, will create an instant, Pavlovian-like stress response. Seriously, just try playing your phones default alarm tone in the office and watch what happens to your colleagues’ faces. But that doesn’t have to be the case. No more do you have to be a slave to the tyranny of repetitive default alarm tones. Today, Google launched an update to…