In these modern times it seems the easiest way to offend people is to mock their choice of phone. The biggest war is of course between Android and iPhone users – for every possible argument, there is a counterargument from the other camp. Microsoft decided to mock this ridiculous “war” with their new Lumia ad, which is set at a wedding.

Microsoft is showing off Nokia’s flagship phone, the Lumia 920. The Lumia 920 is arguably the current best Windows Phone device. With the current smartphone market belonging to Apple and Samsung, Nokia has been having a tough time in the last few years. A few years back they were by far biggest cellphone maker in the world, and had wonderful profits. These days those profits have dried up, but their latest Lumia phones do seem be having a positive effect. The Lumia range has also steadily moved into more entry level phone, with pretty great offerings in the form of the Lumia 620 and 520.

Tell us what you think of Microsoft’s latest ad: (more…)

To say Apple and Samsung are friendly rivals in the smartphone market would be to say that North and South Korea are friendly neighbouring countries. Although there exists no nuclear threat, tensions between the smartphone giants tend to be as explosive as a full-scale nuclear war. Apple has a love-hate relationship with the Korean giant due to their chips being developed there and that has always been a slippery slope for the Cupertino based company. (more…)

Apple’s latest laptops have slowly moved away from traditional cable based networking, so users are forced to move to wifi networks, or be forced to use adaptors to connect to Ethernet cables. While it is not a major issue, traditional 802.11n based networks are not exactly speedy. They top out at a theoretical 300 or 450 Mbps, but they never get close to that speed.

While the new standard has not been finalised, new code from the latest Mac OS X 10.8.4 beta release shows that Apple is working on getting their software ready. This means that upcoming Macs might indeed ship with “ac” capable wireless networking. And because Apple sells wireless networking equipment in the form of its Airport device range, expect them to be upgraded soon as well. Apple is most probably waiting for the 802.11ac standard to finalized before shipping this hardware.

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If you’re not reading Asymco for insight into the business behind mobile technology you’re missing out. Writer and analyst Horace Dediu put a great tweet out earlier today about the marketing spend of some of the worlds biggest retail companies:

Interesting to see that Samsung spends the most although this does make sense in that they’re advertising everything from the latest Galaxy phone to a TV or laptop (for full info on what falls under Samsung Electronics click here). These are interesting numbers but nothing without context. Twitter user @Chiphanna went and ran these numbers in order to compare marketing spend vs revenue and came up with some interesting figures:

Essentially for every dollar Apple spends on marketing, they make $156 in revenue. Compare that to Samsung that have to spend a dollar to only make a  relatively low $46 in revenue and you wonder if someone like Samsung is doing something wrong? (more…)

There are a few big dogs in tech that always seem to know more about what is going on behind the scenes at Apple. These include guys like MG Siegler and John Gruber amongst others. These guys started chatting on Branch, and there are some very interesting blurbs of info which will be of great interest to fans of the iPhone.

Apparently the iOS7 update is bigger than originally planned, and is currently running behind. Apple has moved engineers from the Mac OS X 10.9 team to hurry up the iOS7 development. The big news with iOS7 is that Scott Forstall (which headed up iOS since day one) has moved away from Apple, and Jony Ive (the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design) has taken his place for UI design.

The new iOS7 changes is apparently so big that current engineers are using special filters on their phones so that no one can peak over and see the new design. iOS has been heavily criticised for its skeumorphic heavy interface, and the new iOS will have a lot cleaner design.

Some other interesting observations from the online chat: (more…)

I’m so sick to death of waiting for the Mailbox app on my iPhone I’m almost at the point of deleting it yet something keeps me hanging out. For those not in the know:

“The Mailbox app uses gestures to make quick work of incoming mail, allowing you to clear out your inbox in a jiffy.”

The app is apparently life changing, however I’m tired of waiting and I think this reservation system is a bad way of going about things. The reservation system is fairly simple: “Demand for Mailbox has been incredible, and in order to deliver a world-class email experience we’re filling reservations on a first-come, first-served basis. If you’ve already reserved your Mailbox, download the app and enter your reservation info. If you don’t have a reservation, download the app to get your place in line. Everyone can watch the line move in real-time from inside the app.” (more…)

As a teenager all I ever wanted at school was a locker. There were two reasons for this, firstly so I could have awkward encounters with the pretty girl serendipitously placed next to me and secondly so that I didn’t have to carry all those heavy books around!

Thankfully Core (the distributors of Apple in South Africa) have both solved my historical problems and ruined my serendipity fantasy. Last week the company released ZABooks, a project to get every single South African textbook onto the iPad to get kids learning using digital textbooks.

The concept is simple: you download the ZABooks app onto your iPad (I can see the iPad Mini becoming the de facto choice for schools soon) and then go to the ZABooks website to buy the books you require. You then login to the app on your iPad and you can start downloading books. You can get books from Grade 1 to Grade 12 and at launch there are over 600 textbooks already available. All the major publishers are on board and books are generally at least 25% cheaper than the print editions. I took a random book on the store (Advocates For Change by Moeletsi Mbeki) and while ZABooks charges R180 for it you can get the print edition for R202 on Kalahari.net. That is without shipping (anything over R250 gets free shipping) and Kalahari is generally cheaper than brick and mortar stores so pricing does seem spot on. From a pricing perspective it’s probably going to take a while to amortise the cost of the iPad but in my house we have an upgrade cycle where an “old” iPad is passed down to the younger members of the family meaning that child already had access to an iPad. (more…)

This week we posted our review of living with the iPhone 5, and asked the question of whether it is worth upgrading to. While the design is an evolutionary update as is the norm with iPhones, we still believe it is a great phone.

The iPhone is always a difficult phone to review, because by the time it reaches South Africa, interested people have already read everything they need to know about the phone. This time around South Africa got the iPhone quite late in comparison to previous years, and we were all too pleased when an iPhone 5 finally got delivered to us on launch day by Vodacom. First off, we did not want to rush a quick review of the device. We basically wanted to know one thing – is it still the gold standard in the smartphone world? And that meant spending a few weeks with it.

See below for our video review: (more…)