Author: Max Milella

You may remember that a few months ago LG announced it would be closing the doors on its smartphone department. Its phones will still be on shelves for a little longer, but they’ll all be gone soon enough. Cutting its losses and looking to re-bolster its revenue, the South Korean consumer tech giant is now getting in on the EV game. LG and EVs? Sounds good to me. Now, don’t start jumping to conclusions just yet. Unlike Xiaomi, this manufacturer isn’t going to be making its own cars. Instead it’s playing to its strengths and will be building auto parts…

You, me and Lenovo all know how the saying goes: less is more. And that’s certainly true when it comes to wires and cables. Particularly now that we’re so dependent on them. So Lenovo has come up with a ‘wireless’ laptop charging solution. Lenovo, no strings (or wires) attached, sort of The tech-maker calls its charger the ‘Go Wireless Charging Kit’. You can slap it on to a variety of laptops to enable wireless charging on them. The kit is made up of two pieces of gear: a 3.2mm-thick metal charging mat, and a wireless receiver that you connect to…

If you’re on Instagram and somehow haven’t come across the adorable little web comic ‘Strange Planet’, then you should absolutely rectify that asap. Created by Nathan Pyle and read by more than 6 million people, the web comic (and related best-selling print comic books) centre around cutesy aliens doing human things in adorably alien ways. Now, Apple is turning it into an animated series for Apple TV+. Strange Planet’s “sweet existence” on screen See? Adorable. The humour in each comic is generally found in the fittingly alien way the characters describe ordinary things. For example, instead of saying “Sweet dreams”…

Marvel said Endgame was the most ambitious crossover of all time. Mojang and Sega would like someone to hold their low-poly beers. Sonic the Hedgehog, the fastest mammal alive, is now officially in Minecraft. As part of his 30th birthday celebration, you can now purchase official Sonic DLC for one of the most played games in the world.  Crafting around at the speed of sound with Sonic Now, Sonic’s definitely been in Minecraft before. There’s a mod for everything, after all. But there’s something enticing about the glamour and polish of official DLC.  Now, you’re not just getting a blue…

Inclusion and acceptance is the order of the day online in current times. Being able to express and embrace your identity on your favourite platforms is becoming more and more possible thanks to the efforts of many platforms to hear feedback from their communities. Zoom is now one of those platforms, as it is adding a feature allowing users to add their pronouns into their bios. Zoom in on who you are In a blog post announcing the feature (added in Zoom 5.7.0) the video conferencing platform expressed that it knew many folks (including its own employees) had taken to…

Clubhouse news has been relatively quiet for the last few weeks. Comparatively, at least. The audio live-room platform was turning heads all over the news-sphere whenever it so much as blinked, and has spawned more than a handful of lookalikes from competitors like Facebook, Reddit, and even Telegram.  But there’s always been one seemingly mandatory feature missing from Clubhouse: direct messaging. Well, the platform just let slip that DMs may be coming after all.  Slide into Clubhouse’s DMs A few users noticed a currently under-development chat feature called ‘Backchannel’ pop up in their UI. The leak vanished as suddenly as…

Twitter India’s managing director, Manish Maheshwari, was called last week to appear at the Ghaziabad police station for not taking down a tweet that was “provoking communal unrest”. The tweet contained a video of an elderly, Muslim man being assaulted in Ghaziabad. Now, in response to the notice and to comply with India’s strict moderation policy, Twitter has blocked all tweets containing the video — in India.  Twitter tries a compromise Across the rest of the tweeting world (except maybe Nigeria) the tweets, 50 of them, remain visible. In short they’ve been geo-blocked, not completely blocked and not removed.  Twitter…

Twitter’s had a rough go of it in India for a solid minute now. Back in April the Indian government had the social media platform delete tweets critical of its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. A month later the government laid out a new set of policies regarding moderation on the platform and on Facebook. Now, the platform’s managing director in India, Manish Maheshwari, has been given a week to appear before the Ghaziabad police regarding a viral video.  Taking Twitter to jail The tweet in question contains a video showing an elderly Muslim man being attacked in Ghaziabad. After…

Ford is well known for providing vehicles for both personal and commercial use. Keeping up with current vehicle trends, it’s got some electric offerings in both realms. And it has now acquired Electriphi, a startup that created some handy software for EV battery and management and fleet monitoring. Ford’s EV plans are Electriphi-ing Ford picked up Eletriphi specifically in light of its commercial EV plans. The electric F-150 Lighting Pro (a commercial variant of the standard Lightning EV) was revealed last month and the automaker plans to aim it, along with an electric E-transit cargo van, at commercial customers looking…

It’s pretty well-known that Mark Zuckerberg and his minions working over at Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty obsessed with ads. After all, how else are they meant to land themselves that fat ad-provided check? Now, because having ads show up as regular posts on Instagram wasn’t enough, Reels will start showing ads too. More ads? Reel-y, Instagram? Reels is Instagram’s take on the massively popular social media platform Tiktok. They’re short form videos that users can decorate with filters, stickers, music, and so on. It’s not copying, it’s inspiration.  Now, as you scroll through reels for hours on end,…