Gadget Maven Blog

Is the iPhone OS 3.0 as good as Apple says: oh yes

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:41:00 +0000

The world’s iPhone users waited not so patiently for Apple to release the iPhone OS 3.0 upgrade that finally added all the smartphone features that you’d expect from a smartphone.
In the meantime, you can read our review of the newly announced iPhone 3G S.
More info:

PC World’s 10 hidden features of iPhone 3.0
Sync your iPhone using Google Sync

Canon G10 review: prosumer power camera

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:40:23 +0000

The best camera is always the one you have with you. If you’re at a party or walking the streets of Marrakesh, you want something you can put in a pocket and not have to worry about. Sure, you could do amazing things with a big Nikon D90, but it would spend a lot of time at home without you.
That’s where ‘prosumer’ digicams come in: simple to use as a point-and-shoot, but with the features and manual control to develop your abilities – all in a compact, pocketable frame.
Canon’s G series cameras have always been big for compacts (you’ll get the G10 into a jacket or cargo pocket), but they’ve long had the biggest reputation, too. And the G10, released at the end of 2008, is a giant leap forward.
At last, Canon has put a wide-angle lens on its G series. Point-and-shoot consumers go for the big zoom numbers (50-240mm), then wonder why they can’t get the whole family in the frame at Christmas dinner and their holiday pics always show half a building. The G10’s 5x zoom starts at a wide 28mm and zooms to 140mm, which is an ideal range for landscapes, single and group portraits, and pretty much everything urban. If you’re shooting sports or wildlife, you may – may – find Canon’s teleconverter useful.
There’s a 14.7MP CCD, longer-lasting battery, upgraded software, and a bigger and better LCD. You’ll get superb images, with fast startup and autofocus. Classic rangefinder form, rugged build quality, and good ergonomics for one-handed operation. It looks a little intimidating for beginners, but they’ll cope. It looks the part, and it’s a pleasure to use. We haven’t spoken to a G10 owner who doesn’t enjoy playing with it.
The competition is Nikon’s P6000: smaller, with a 2.5x 24-60mm zoom. In our opinion it’s a close second. Investigate online and you can enjoy one of photography’s most sacred traditions, the Canon vs Nikon jihad. It’s like Blue Bulls and Sharks supporters, but with smaller fingers. We don’t think the Nikon guys will win this round, though.
(Want to join in? Just slag one of them off online. Compare, say, a Canon DSLR with a Nikon compact and conclude that Nikon lenses are inferior. It drives them nuts.)

Price: R7 500

Features

14.7 Megapixels
5x wide-angle lens (28-140mm, f/2.8-45) with optical image stabiliser and 1cm macro
Buffered RAW recording, DIGIC 4 processing, live histogram
Face recognition, Face Select & Track
Bright 3.0” LCD (460k resolution), optical viewfinder
26 shooting modes, full manual mode, customisable controls
Video’s not HD, but it’ll shoot 640 x 480 pixels at 30fps
109 x 78 x 46 mm, 350g

More info

See the full specs on the Canon website.
Read the DPreview here and Luminous Landscape here

Is the Palm Pre all it’s made out to be? Yes

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:39:44 +0000

Palm was showing off it’s new iPhone-matching Pre in Barcelona earlier this year, making waves at Mobile World Congress when all the focus was supposed to be on new Google Android phones.
In the short while I played with it, it was enough for me to know it’s the kind of cellphone that earns its right o be called an “iPhone killer”.
The sentiment is much the same now that it has been released in the United States, but sadly only on Sprint’s CDMA and not the GSM standard we use in South Africa. There is no release date for the rest of the world, so I doubt we’ll see it this year.
What makes the Palm Pre stand out are it’s clever integration of many must-have technologies. It has a touch screen, but it also has a slide-out Qwerty keypad.
It has an accelerometer, so it can be used sideways, and has uses a remarkable contact charger (ie no plugging in charging cables).
Perhaps it’s greatest asset though is it’s new operating system, webOS, which is a triumphant return to the kind of simple but solid foundation that made the original Palms so beloved by their users.
The new incarnation has a superb user experience, offering a clever integration of messaging, contacts and calendaring that at first glance is genius, at second glance sheer genius.
Palm calls this feature Synergy, pulling Outlook, Google and Facebook calendaring and contacts into one unified view. It does the same with messaging, combining all your conversations – be they email, IM, Facebook messages, or SMSs – into one grouped stream. Shades of Google Wave anyone? Months before Google announced it to boot.
You can run multiple applications at one time, accessing them by swiping sideways, and uses great touchscreen gestures. You can also search through it with universal search, only recently introduced on the iPhone in version 3.0 of its software.
A three megapixel camera, built-in GPS, WiFi and excellent multimedia use of video and photos on its 3,1-inch (7,8cm) touchscreen complete the package.
The 34-button Qwerty keypad has proved to be the most contentious feature, in early reviews, because they are quite small, but it does have a dedicated @ symbol.
So, the keypad may be made for midgets, but you get used to it. It’s certainly bigger than the miniscule one under the flap of the Sony Ericsson P910 that was the smartphone of choice in SA for a good while.
Then, of course, there is the Palm app store – where you can buy third-party apps and use them on the phone. This concept was originated by Palm back in the 1990s, but popularised by Apple, who have arguably made it easier (a few clicks) to use. Apple had all of the iTunes Store experience to do that but credit must go to Palm in the first place.
Palm has made some of the biggest, and dumbest, mistakes in business. It had a commanding lead in the nascent personal digital assistant (PDA) market, which is effectively created. But it fudged, and continued to fudge, it’s transition to what we now know as smartphones. It bought Treo from it’s own co-founders who’d left when corporate politics stopped them from innovating. It made a few good Treo smartphones, and then promptly rode all its good will into the ground with a series of calamitous decisions, from spinning off it’s operating system into a separate company, several re-branding exercises and even (god forbid) using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
But Jon Rubinstein, who led on the original iPod team, has turned the company around. Rubinstein, Palm’s chairman since October 2007, took over as chief executive from Palm-lifer Ed Colligan.
“With Palm webOS we have 10-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products,” he said. I certainly hope so.
I said it back when I was a Palm V user: the secret to Palm was it’s operating system. It was light, robust, reliable and ideally designed for PDAs. Compared to the then recently released Windows CE (out of which Windows Mobile developed), it was like Apple to Microsoft.

Specs

Camera: 3.2 megapixel, LED flash
Display: 3,1in (7,8cm) touchscreen, 320×480 HVGA resolution
Connectivity: 3G EVDO Rev A; Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g): Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) and A2DP (Bluetooth stereo)
GPS
Memory: 8GB, USB storage mode

More information

All the specs on the Palm site

What the others are saying:
Walt Mossberg calls it “a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class”. Read his review here.

Twitocalypse was damp squib, but Dell’s laughing to the bank

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:38:56 +0000

The Twitocalypse – Twitter’s equivalent of Y2K – happened on Saturday, causing some applications to malfunction and briefly disrupting the Twitterverse.
But like the so-called Millennium Bug it was as much of a damp squib, and may just have been a viral marketing stunt. Either way, it’s made mathematics sexy for a brief time.
Y2K occurred when the calendar clicked over from 1999 (31 December 1999 or 191231 in six-figure dates) to 2000 (1 January 2000, or 200101). Early computer programmers had left out the “19” part of the year, creating global fears for computer and financial meltdowns.
The Twitocalypse was caused when the number of Tweets reached 2,147,483,6471. The number is significant because each Tweet is given a unique identifying number and some applications couldn’t store higher than that.
That two billion-something figure is the highest known number in a mathematical set known as “signed integer,” which uses a 32-bit integer system. In case you wanted to know, the unsigned integer set can go up 4,294,967,295.
The scare was sparked by the twitpocalypse.com webpage, which had a countdown to when that integer would be reached, and was put up by Martin Dufort, CEO of developer Wherecloud, told the LA Times it was “a viral marketing move”.
Luckily the whole system didn’t fall over and most people could still send and receive the 140-character messages that are the most popular form of messaging and social media this year. Facebook was the most popular social networking site last year, and MySpace the year before. Who knows what it will be next year?
Meanwhile, Twitter got some good news when Dell, the world’s second largest computer seller, said it had sold $3-million worth of computers through it’s Twitter account.
It’s been roundly applauded online as a real world demonstration of the value of Twitter, so often derided because people post trivial details like what they had for lunch.
But as the Guardian points out, working with a slightly lower figure: “$2-million is not even a drop in the ocean compared to Dell’s overall sales of $12-billion in the last three months (stat fans: Twitter is the sales channel for 0.008% of Dell stock) and overall the company’s sales are taking a beating – down 23% for the most recent quarter”.
Both these events confirm Twitter’s status as not only the fastest growing social networking site, but also the most hyped. This year.

This article first appeared in The Times newspaper on 15 June 2009.

How Twitter came of age in South Africa

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:38:00 +0000

Forget trees falling in forests. If a plane crashes into a bakkie on a remote Gauteng road, did it happen if no one is there to Tweet about it?
Twitter, the hugely popular micro-blogging service, came into it’s own over the weekend, breaking the remarkable story of a freak accident, miraculously in which no one died. Then, the nearby “freeborders” dragged the two injured occupants from the plane moments before it was engulfed in flame.
In the past, such news would be a two or three paragraph story buried on an inside page days later, recording the accident and little more. In today’s always connected, Twitterverse it was a dramatic, visceral, heart-stopping, heroics-filled story that thousands followed online and was good enough to be the front page lead for The Times newspaper.
It was a lead story by virtue of any three of the utterly amazing aspects: a plane flying head-on into a bakkie (which coincidentally stopped it from going over a cliff), no fatalities and the heroics of the nearby witnesses, led by Jono Herbst. This is real life at it’s very best.
It certainly helped that the extreme sports participants are some of South Africa’s most sophisticated internet and social media professionals.
As Craig Rodney, whose dramatic picture was the first to be posted and claimed the front page, said to me later: “We got the pilots out and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Then the phones came out and we started Tweeting,” (as individual Twitter updates are known).
Any doubt that Twitter was a geeky pastime evaporated a few months ago, as it became the fastest growing social media network. Last year already Barack Obama had announced his candidacy for the US presidency via Twitter, and by the time Oprah Winfrey started Tweeting early this year, the world was ready to forget Facebook.
We saw Twitters gain mainstream appeal in South Africa with our own elections in April, when celebrities picked up on it; and Radio 702’s Aki Anastasiou’s aerial Twitter pictures ended up on the BBC’s website to illustrate their election story.
Twitter’s website traffic has surged, making it the fastest growing social networking site, although a lot of people use other software applications to access it, like TweetDeck, Nambu or TwitterFon.
“And it’s going to overtake all the others,” says Arthur Goldstuck, MD of World Wide Worx. “In this country it’s still the tool of IT, media and marketing people. Outside of those three distinct categories, it’s virtually unheard of. Word of mouth on Twitter is huge.”
As was pointed out by another media-savvy Twitterer during last week’s Air France plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean, Twitter was running about an hour ahead of traditional media.
Twitter may seem like an oddity to the uninitiated, but it’s recently been bathed in good publicity and even has Google worried.
“People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Google’s co-founder Larry Page said last month. “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis,” Page told his own Google’s Zeitgeist conference.
While Google’s sophisticated search engine can take hours or days to be updated, whereas Twitter’s stream of, admittedly unstructured, are almost instantaneous.
Time magazine, which maintains its royal crown in an ever-more online world, splashed Twitter across its most recent front cover trumpetting: “How Twitter will change the way we live”.
Time quotes technology writer Clive Thompson, who “calls this ‘ambient awareness’: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.”
Ashton Kutcher, who was the first Twitter user to reach one million followers (in a mock war with CNN’s Larry King to raise awareness about African aid), has emerged as the most popular celebrity on Facebook.
Kutcher, writing in Time’s 100 list of powerful and influential people, is unequivocal in his praise for Twitter’s founders: “Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — because the creation of Twitter by Stone, 35, Williams, 37, and Jack Dorsey, 32, is as significant and paradigm-shifting as the invention of Morse code, the telephone, radio, television or the personal computer.”
Hyperbole perhaps, But think back – if you knew, or can remember – to when Williams launched another radical new communications platform called Blogger.com. Bought by Google, it was one of the first such applications of this self-publishing paradigm we call Web 2.0.
Blogging was laughingly dismissed for it’s too-short, MTV generation, two-paragraph writing style. No one is laughing anymore. Especially not about Twitter.

This article first appeared in The Times newspaper on 9 June 2009.

The TImes
9 June 2009
http://www.thetimes.co.za/Entertainment/Article.aspx?id=101431 9 .June 2009

Miraculous plane crash – reported by Twitter

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:36:49 +0000

Several amazing things happened this week.
The first was an one-in-a-million accident, followed by a remarkable display of heroism by a group of South African geeks who went for a day of extreme sports and got a whole lot more adrenaline.
Then another amazing thing happened: Twitter took off as a news tip-off service, resulting in a front page story for The Times newspaper, the South African national newspaper for which I write a column.
Here’s what happened:First a light aircraft crashed head-on into a bakkie [pick up truck] in a freak accident near Krugersdorp Airport, west of Johannesburg, around 2pm. Amazingly no-one was killed and the pilot and passenger only suffered light injuries.
Then, the group of friends dragged the two men from the burning plane, moments before it was engulfed into flames.The remarkable accident happened just after the two-seater Pyper Cherokee took off, hitting the bakkie head-on and bursting into flames.
A group of Johannesburg internet and media professionals – including Nic Haralambous, Craig Rodney, Rich Mulholland, Mike Stopforth, Don Packett, Riccardo Webb, Nic Jackson and several others – were freebording with Jono Herbst, who runs a company called Pure Rush. Freeboarding is an extreme sport which is similar to snowboarding but uses a skateboard on a steep tarred hill.
Their friends Monica Braganca and Anna Vaulina were driving a pick-up truck, or bakkie as it’s known in South Africa, down the hill to collect them when the accident happened.
“The plane was flying straight towards the bakkie when it dipped and recovered, then dipped again. It was literally heading straight for us,” Vaulina told this reporter shortly after the accident.
“The plane hit the ground first, about five to 10 metres from us, and then it bounced straight into the bakkie.”She added: “There was a split second in my mind when I thought we were going to die. It felt like in a movie. Things like this don’t happen to you. We’re all very, very lucky.”
Braganca, who was driving, said: “We saw the plane coming down, I honestly didn’t think it would crash and it would pull up. When it hit the ground, I just closed my eyes and kept my foot on the brakes and braced myself. We pretty much saw it coming.
“I think we were very lucky we were in the car we were – a Ford Ranger bakkie, with a bull bar. I am going to go out and buy myself a 4×4 now.”
The plane burst into flames but the impact had buckled the doors, so both women climbed out the windows. A passenger was thrown from the back. All were unhurt, and the two women were later treated for shock.
Meanwhile, Haralambous, Rodney, Mulholland, Stopforth, Packett, Webb and Jackson, led by Herbst, were heralded as heroes by Braganca and Vaulina. “The Pure Rush guys were brilliant,” Vaulina added.
The friends saw the accident and ran up the hill to help the plane’s occupants escape.
Vaulina said: “They were running around, covered in blood, it was very heroic.”
She added: “I take my hat off to the guys. Everyone was petrified that at any second [the plane] was going to explode.”
“It was surreal,” Rodney told me later. “Nic, Jono [Herbst from Pure Rush] and I were the first guys there. I felt like a was running towards a movie screen. [In a situation like this] your only frame of reference is movies.”
“Nic told me afterwards he couldn’t believe he was running towards a plane on fire. We kept thinking: ‘Am I in a f__king movie?’”
Haralambous said when they got to the plane its engine and the cockpit were already on fire. Both occupants were covered in blood: the first person they helped out had numerous facial injuries and splattered Haralambous and the others with blood.
Haralambous said: “I started shouting at the guy who I was helping: ‘Move, you need to move.’ We had to move them three or four times. We were all so exhausted and we were worried about their injuries. The guy I was helping kept saying ‘my back, my neck’.”
They moved the men three or times, very cautiously, “four of us moved one guy at a time.”
The plane set the neighbouring veld on fire, which quickly spread up the hill to where the friends’ car were parked. Some of the party moved the cars back, before they could be engulfed in flames.
About 10 minutes later the police, emergency services and paramedics arrived.
After the initial excitement, Rodney sent the first of several messages and pictures taken with his iPhone to Twitter, the hugely popular micro-blogging service. The others followed and thousands viewed their pictures and videos.

More stories, pictures and videos:

To read the front page article in The Times, click here.
To read my article on how Twitter came of age, click here.
To see Craig Rodney’s pictures immediately after the plane crash, click here and here.
To see Riccardo Webb’s videos of the aftermath, click here and here.
To see Riccardo Webb’s pictures of the plane on fire and the mangled bakkie, click here.
To read Mike Stopforth’s account of the day, click here.

HTC Magic review, history of touchscreens

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:35:27 +0000

There was a time when a touchscreen cellphone was an unsexy gadget, seen as backward-thinking and hankering after those early personal digital assistants (PDAs) like the legendary Palm.

For years, I clung to my last Palm, swopping it only when Sony Ericsson’s P910i became sufficiently functional and when the idea of two stand-alone hand-helds was no longer practical. For a long time, it was only the Swedish-Japanese maker that made such touchscreens, still looked at as a kind of anomaly.

DISCLAIMER: This review was written before the SA distributors Leaf offered a competition, as discussed on ZA Tech Show episode 64.

BlackBerry’s Qwerty keyboard and those 12-keys of the average cellphone became the only interfaces with a cellphone that the average person wanted to use.

Then two-and-a-half years ago, something happened that made touchscreens sexy all over again. So sexy that every cellphone manufacturer had to have one. Immediately.

Whatever was life like prior to January 2007, or 0 BI (Before iPhone)?

Touchscreens never truly died out, but they were certainly in the minority, a forgotten technology. A forgotten interface when the accuracy of T9 predictive text and a five-way arrow key were top-dog in the thumb wars.

Now, led by the iPhone, touchscreens have been the must-have interface for the past two years at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Oscars and Rand Show of the cellular industry.

But very few touchscreen phones have rivalled Apple’s – in no small part because of the solid, almost unbreakable operating system that underpins it and it’s thoroughly brilliant internet access. It’s a superb iPod too, especially for video, but an average cellphone with crappy battery life. I haven’t tried Nokia’s thrilling new N97 yet and only briefly fiddled with Palm’s game-changing Pre, but Apple’s biggest competition has emerged – and not from another manufacturer but from an unexpected source and seeming ally against Microsoft: Google.

Last year Google launched the first of the so-called Gphones, handsets running the Android operating system it’s giving away to handset makers. This clever open source OS is a not-so-subtle ploy by Google to maintain the dominance it has on computers by shifting to mobiles, the fastest growing market segment for accessing the internet.

Google make no bones about it: they want you to use their server-based services, which live somewhere out there in “the cloud” (as the vast network of servers is called). Worrying about which device has which contact on it, or has synced with whatever email account is soooo old school, they reason. Why not have it all sitting in Gmail and just access it from any device, they argue. Hard to counter.

Now, the HTC Magic – the second generation handset from the Taiwanese manufacturer that is coincidentally Microsoft’ biggest partner in Windows Mobile handsets – has landed in South Africa. And what a device it is.

Clearly it’s benefitted from what’s been discovered with the first handset (and dispensed with its slide-out Qwerty keypad) and the whole experience is smooth and intuitive. It integrates with Google brilliantly, and after a few clicks to input my Gmail username and password and I was reading my mail (using Google’s superb mobile email app) and surfing almost effortlessly.

As you’d expect the online experience is superb.

The touchscreen is responsive and easy to use – and perhaps the phone’s only fault is that it isn’t multi-touch, that is, it can only identify one finger at a time. On-screen zoom in and out buttons solve that and it resizes web pages pretty well.

The virtual keyboard uses the built-in vibrating alert to buzz each time you hit a letter, so you feel like you’re pressed a key, and the predictive texting wasn’t bad at all.

Sold exclusively through Vodacom, the HSDPA phone comes with several data bundles which you’ll need if you’re going to use the Magic to it’s full, mobile internet-accessing potential.

For an old Palm-lover like me, it’s pleasing to see how right Palm was.

Key specs

Camera: 3.2 megapixel, auto focus
Display: 3.2-inch (8cm) TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen, 320×480 HVGA resolution
Connectivity: HSDPA/WCDMA; Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g): Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP (Bluetooth stereo)
GPS and Digital Compass
Memory: microSD slot

More info

Read more specifications on the HTC site.

DISCLAIMER: This review was written before the SA distributors Leaf offered a competition, as discussed on ZA Tech Show episode 64.

iPhone 3GS launched, available in SA in July

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:29:19 +0000

The new iPhone 3GS, which will be available in South Africa in July, might finally be the complete smartphone package it’s been hyped to be.

Anyone who hasn’t been on planet earth for the last 18 months might be forgiven for wondering why Apple’s smartphone is heralded as the greatest ever cellphone when it’s only just gotten up to speed with all the features Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson have had for years.

There are two reasons. The first is that the iPhone was Apple’s first attempt. As far as version 1.0 products go, it’s pretty good. Pretty darn good. After the phenomenal success of the iPod, expectations were through the roof that Apple would sprinkle the same magic dust on cellphones. Much to the continuing irritation of so many people in the industry, it did.

The second reason is that Apple made touchscreens sexy again. By using a larger than normal screen, and the clever multitouch interface, Apple effectively introduced a mini-tablet computer. Typing may be a bitch, but the mobile internet experience is second to none.

Revision three of the software fixes some of the most high-profile bugs: it can now cut-and-paste copy, you can send MMSs, forward SMSs, type in landscape mode in all the apps, and use voice commands to make calls.

Hardware-wise it catches up to other smartphones with a decent 3 megapixel camera (up from 2MP), shoot video (at 30fps) and finally use HSDPA 7.2Mbps speeds (the S is for speed).

Current iPhone users will be pleased to hear the iPhone has better battery life – one of the bugbears of the device is how appalling the battery is – but it’s unknown if the new operating system will fix that in the second generation handsets sold in South Africa.

Other improvements in the 3GS, which is available in 16GB and 32GB models, are so-called universal search, voice memo recordings, built-in Nike + support, data encryption, a way to remotely wipe it and an internal compass. A new, handy addition is so-called internet tethering, a way to use your iPhone’s data package on your computer.

The iPhone has generated unprecedented hype – and a fair amount of it is worth it. Remember that much of this hype began in the States which doesn’t have as sophisticated a smartphone culture as here or Europe or Asia. The iPhone has changed that, firing up sales of BlackBerries and Nokias.

It also introduced a totally different internet experience to mobile phones, paving the way for clever devices like the Android-driven HTC Magic, which really harness the power of web-based services that Google has popularised.
Vodacom says it will launch iPhone 3G S, “the fastest most powerful iPhone yet, in South Africa in July 2009”.

The iPhone 3GS is finally the smartphone it was hyped to be.

Key specs

Camera: 3 megapixel, auto focus
Display: 3.5-inch (8.9cm) TFT-LCD flat multi-touch screen, 480×320-pixel resolution
Connectivity: UMTS/HSDPA; Wi-Fi (802.11b/g); Bluetooth 2.1 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) and A2DP (Bluetooth stereo)
Assisted GPS, Digital compass
Memory: 16 or 32GB

More info:

For more on the iPhone 3GS, see the Apple website.
The full iPhone 3GS specs are here.
Compare the new iPhone 3GS vs the 3G here.

Welcome to GadgetMaven

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:26:59 +0000

What new cellphone should I get?

It’s a question almost every South African asks every two years and they seldom get a coherent, authoratative answer.

No longer. GadgetMaven will answer all your questions, help your choose that new phone, or digital camera or TV or dSLR or game console. We’ll even tell you what laptop to buy.

GadgetMaven is a labour of love written by a bunch of gadgetfiends and tech-lovers, and editted by Toby Shapshak.

Shapshak’s day job is editing Stuff magazine, and he writes a technology column for The Times newspaper.

Hello world!

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:21:19 +0000

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!