Author: Trent Meikle

Alexa’s on the backfoot Amazon’s Alexa is due for a massive AI overhaul – set to be revealed as soon as this month – that’ll see customers paying an extra monthly fee to fully realise its newfound smarts. That was the plan, anyway. Despite setting a date of 26 February for a hardware showcase, reporters indicate that Amazon has hit another speed bump in the road. Another speed bump could delay the AI rollout even further, which has thus far suffered several setbacks already. According to The Washington Post (via The Verge), the retail outfit will stick with the 26 February…

Having spent the better part of a year with Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 13 Pro+, we were keen to see what Xiaomi had cooked up for 2025. Unsurprisingly that turned out to be the recently released Redmi Note 14 Series, of which we managed to get our hands on the middle-of-the-park Note 14 Pro 5G (not to be mistaken for the more affordable (yet weaker) Pro (4G)). This year, it’s not as simple as choosing the best smartphone you can afford. As good as Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 14 Pro 5G efforts are this year (and they are good), sporting 8/12GB of RAM…

For a supposedly artificially intelligent chatbot dubbed Gemini Advanced (for paying users), it doesn’t seem all that… advanced. Google is changing that, introducing improved contextual reasoning by allowing it to access a chat’s history, which in turn lets it offer “more tailored help.” Gemini Advanced in training “Starting today, Gemini can now recall your past chats to provide more helpful responses. Whether you’re asking a question about something you’ve already discussed, or asking Gemini to summarize a previous conversation, Gemini now uses information from relevant chats to craft a response,” Google said in an announcement. That means no more starting…

We’ll be the first to admit we huffed too much hopium in the build-up to PlayStation’s State of Play, which wrapped up at roughly 00h40 this morning. Where we desperately hoped to see a Bloodborne remaster grace our PS5, we got something much better. Say hello to Days Gone Remastered and a whole lot more. The 40-minute-long show was a snapshot of what Sony has planned for 2025 and beyond. This isn’t all that’s lined up – PlayStation likes to do a couple of these things each year – but it does supply a fair idea of what we can expect, particularly…

Apple, still coming down from the high of last week’s riveting Severance episode, just dropped the official Apple TV app for Android devices – particularly smartphones, tablets, and foldables – something that subscribers have begged for ever since Lumon Apple launched its in-house streamer nearly six years ago now. Absolute cinema Before, those hoping to see Silo or Slow Dogs were forced to make do with Apple TV on their smartphone or tablet’s browser or resort to watching it on their TV – where the app has been available for some time, even on Android-based TV boxes. It wasn’t exactly a detriment to the platform’s…

It’s about time, Sony. After weeks of hearing various insiders and tipsters proclaim the forbidden gospel that PlayStation had something big lined up for February, we’ve finally received confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth. Announced in a blog post, PlayStation has a State of Play lined up for midnight tonight, local time. Annoyingly, this isn’t a Showcase – a larger, longer event that Sony typically reserves for when it has multiple big somethings cooking in the pipeline. The State of Play is usually a shorter, sweeter event focussing on the games landing in the coming months. Don’t get too down. Sony…

Having spent the better part of 2024 in the company of Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 13 Pro+, we were keen to see what Xiaomi had in store for this year. At a launch event in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 11 February, Xiaomi announced the new Redmi Note 14 series comprising five devices – Redmi Note 14 (4G + 5G), 14 Pro (4G+5G), and the 14 Pro+ 5G. Xiaomi hasn’t wasted any time getting these out to the public, unusually selling a few models through the regular storefronts a whole week before the official launch. Xiaomi took the opportunity to put the spotlight…

The PlayStation Store is no longer the slop-filled wasteland that it was once. Previously you couldn’t get past the home page without first encountering some low-effort ‘game’ designed to bolster your trophy list and take up valuable storage. Now, Sony has delisted several of these titles that took their developers all of five minutes to make, using a mixture of recycled assets and in some cases, AI. Good riddance Titles such as Backrooms Brotherhood, Supermarket Simulator Pro, and Bodycam Shooter are just a few of the games released in the past few months by one of the biggest contributors to the issue, RandomSpin.…

Now that the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) has passed judgement on the official fuel price adjustments in South Africa for February, we turn our attention towards March 2025. Surely, we thought, after two months of back-to-back increases for both petrol and diesel, there’d be some sort of reprieve, right? How wrong we were. Bad news for petrol prices The Central Energy Fund (CEF) has continued to pump its daily snapshots, offering curious South Africans a glance at the upcoming petrol price changes that could either save or hurt their wallets. It’s worth noting that the CEF’s figures…

Apple’s got a big week ahead Apple, preferring not to be left out of the conversation so dominated by Samsung at the beginning of the year, plans to reveal the iPhone SE 4 soon, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports. We’ll have to wait for Apple to confirm an official release date – though Gurman says it will still be released this February. If Gurman is correct, Apple could be targeting a reveal as soon as this week. Unlike the Big Fruit Company’s flagship devices that ship globally like clockwork, the entry-level SE range takes things at a slower pace. The third-gen…