Google’s messaging systems have quickly become a mess – with the launch of Google Chat a decade ago they had a pretty decent headstart. But they quickly branched out into different channels with the launch of Google Voice, and later the Hangouts feature in Google+.

Google Talk was luckily built on the Jabber standard until now, meaning that you could quite easily integrate it with many different clients across many platforms. But Google never launched an official Google Chat client outside Android – until now. The new Google Hangouts app is meant to bring Talk, Hangouts video chat and Google Voice together into one product.

(more…)

Nokia keeps on pushing the benefits of its Pureview cameras in its flagship phones – but this time they extended the incredible low light technology to video as well. Their new Lumia 928 phone is not only going to sport a new aluminium casing, it will clearly have an even better camera as well.

(more…)

Even though the Nexus 7 has almost been around for a year, a revamped version was released more recently and we put it through its paces. At such a low price point, the Nexus 7 is a premium device for very little money. We think it’s the best 7-inch Android tablet by a country mile, but how does it compare to something like the iPad Mini? Check out our video review below. (more…)

Right now the entire web is all abuzz about Bitcoin – a digital currency you can use to buy things online, or trade for other currencies like dollars. But Bitcoin is a lot more than that, and is actually a very well thought out system.

Bitcoin was initially designed as a digital currency (“BTC”) to move outside any central bank, and to avoid the current rules of transactions. Bitcoin is entirely decentralized, and is not controlled by any government or reserve bank. Using cryptography and digital signatures, Bitcoin is “mined” by Bitcoin mining machines – these machines need to solve complex mathematical problems, which generate a 64 digit code.

These mining machines are standard PCs but typically customized with very high end graphics processors, and whatever hardware might be needed to work out that difficult maths problem. With each block of Bitcoins that are generated, the maths problem might alter in difficulty. There are thousands of machines working on these problems at any time, and because of increasing difficulty, the market cannot be flooded by a sudden onset of Bitcoins coming into circulation.

Every 10 minutes a block of Bitcoins are issued to miners, provided their machines can solve the complex mathematical problem. 25 bitcoins are generated every ten minutes, but every now and then the rate of new Bitcoins generate halves. For example, it will decrease to 12.5 bitcoins by 2017 – and then halved every 4 years.

Compare this to traditional government issued money – typically a reserve bank can simply print money as needed by the economy.  (more…)

Samsung’s latest Android superphone has many gadget fans salivating, and that massive Samsung advertising budget is bound to come up with some good ads. Samsung has just released their first three ads for the flagship phone, and they do a good job of showing some off the new features.

Samsung’s current strategy of throwing every possible feature at the Galaxy S4 means that they have to show where some of these features might be needed. For example – you might wonder why you need sound with a picture, and Samsung shows us the charming tale of a son sending his mother pictures of his trip, with sound of course: (more…)

BlackBerry has left their fans without a premium phone since the Bold 9900, and instead focussed their efforts on the new BlackBerry 10 operating system. The day has finally come that we can spend some hands on time with their new Z10 handset, which is major shift for BlackBerry. Gone are services like BIS and BES, but BlackBerry has finally caught up with its competitors with decent software and a great new gesture based user interface.

So is a BlackBerry without BIS and the lack of a physical keyboard still retain what makes BlackBerry a great device? (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…)

YouTube has rolled out a brand new video editing feature on the site to enable users to make simple changes to their videos. The feature, that has been available in the service’s TestTube lab since last year, is designed to enable users to apply simple and easy quick fixes as well as some substantial changes to their videos after they have been uploaded. Users can edit their videos without the risk of losing view count, comments or existing links.

YouTube product manager, Jeff Toff, said the idea came about when ”we noticed a lot of the videos that were uploaded to YouTube could use some polish, some basic video editing.” There is even an option to change your existing soundtrack and trim footage.

View the tutorial video below.