Brett Haggard and Simon Dingle talk their way through an interesting tech news week with acquisitions, much-ados about nothing and veins of awesomeness.

• The iPhone 4 storm in a teacup.
• The flood of business news this week including MTN, Naspers and Dimension Data.
• YouTube’s partner programme going live in South Africa.
• More hints at BlackBerry 6.
• Windows Phone 7 for developers.
• Converged devices.
• Movement in the ebook space.

Our technology picks and pick-ons of the week:

• Brett Haggard – Picks:  Guacamole.
• Simon Dingle – Picks: Angry Birds.

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We’re in our new studio space this week, echoes, unpainted walls and all. Brett Haggard, Don Packett, Duncan McLeod and Simon Dingle are your panel this week. We discuss:

• The future of Cell C.
• Improving PC sales and analysts’ expectations for tablet computers.
• Microsoft Mix and the prospects for Windows Phone.
• Sony’s 8001050F error on the PS3.
• Apple vs. HTC in patent dispute.
• In-flight WiFi coming to Mango.
• HP’s Pavilion DM1 netbook.
• Dropped calls on Vodacom and the smartphones that apparently cause them.
• iBurst’s new iDSL service with unlimited bandwidth for gaming.
• Telkom bumping up speed on ADSL lines.

Our picks and pick-ons of the week:

• Duncan McLeod – Picks: Skype for Symbian.
• Brett Haggard – Picks: The Macheist nanoBundle 2.
• Don Packett – Picks: Mi-World and the Mi-Bar for geeks.

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This week Duncan McLeod, Brett Haggard and Simon Dingle discuss:

• Interconnect and other prices.
• Feedback from Nokia World.
• Snow Leopard.
• Google Street View.
• Sony.
• Hosted Blackberry BES.
• Apple’s September announcement.

Our picks and pick-ons of the week:

• Brett Haggard – an early version of Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac that he found on the net.
• Duncan McLeod – Panasonic’s SDR-H80 Camcorder.
• Simon Dingle – Nokia’s ultra rad BH-905 headset.

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In this episode our geeks are spread out across SA. Simon Dingle, Jon Tullett and Will Hahn are in Cape Town for Gartner Symposium 2009, Brett Haggard is in Durban for Microsoft TechEd and Duncan McLeod is at home with his bulldogs in Johannesburg. They hook up on Skype to discuss:

• Gartner Symposium.
• Microsoft TechEd – Windows 7, Live Mesh and all things MS.
• Screens and the rumoured Apple tablet.
• The Nikon S1000pj camera with built-in projector.
• The evolution of interfaces.
• Mobile broadband.
• Eric Schmid leaving the Apple board.

And more…

Our pick and pick-ons for the week:

• Brett Haggard: Picks – Microsoft Live Mesh and VMWare Fusion 2.
• Duncan McLeod: Pick – Microsoft Windows 7 RTM.
• Jon Tullett: Grooveshark.
• Will Hahn: Pick-on – Telkom. Pick – Nintendo Wii.

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Brett Haggard, Ben Kelly, Simon Dingle and later on Duncan McLeod discuss:

• MTN’s new data tweaks.
• Johannesburg’s municipal broadband network.
• Tesla’s new Model S.
• Twitter’s business model.
• Eyeballs mobile advertising.
• Microsoft Live Maps with local hosting.
• Windows Live OneCare is being turned into a free service.
• How much of your security software is necessary?
• Recent developments at Telkom.
• OnLive On-Demand 720p console cloud gaming.
• The latest Microsoft advert tackling Mac.

Our choice technologies this week:

• Ben Kelly: Slotz Racer for iPhone.
• Brett Haggard: Burn for OS X.
• Simon Dingle: Free Download Manager for Windows.

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In this week’s episode Duncan McLeod, Jon Tullett, Simon Dingle, Brett Haggard and Candice Jones discuss:

• The release of Internet Explorer 8.
• Content Management Systems, browser compatibility and all things web development.
• Squarespace versus WordPress versus Drupal versus Joomla.
• Neotel’s new data-centres.
• Google servers in South Africa.
• Google Maps versus Windows Live Maps.
• We get hands on with Duncan’s Kindle 2.
• Halo Wars for Xbox 360.
• Voice-recognition in games.
• Classic adventure and quest games on the Nintendo DS.
• IBM’s probable acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
• Digital publishing.
• A new hack that tackles Intel processors at the cache level.
• iPhone 3.0

Our choice technologies of the week:

• Simon Dingle: BrowserShots and the new Griffin iTrip AutoPilot.
• Candice Jones: The new Shox Duo Mini Speakers.
• Brett Haggard: AppCleaner.
• Duncan McLeod: HowStuffWorks’ Stuff You Should Know podcast.
• Jon Tullett: Sierra classic games bundle (available from Incredible Connection).

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In this week’s episode Jon Tullett, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Simon Dingle and ITWeb’s Candice Jones discuss:

• Google advertising the country manager position for South Africa.
• Google’s new Voice service.
• Why isn’t Skype tackling mobile more aggressively?
• The new Facebook features and layout.
• Twitter’s amazing popularity and lack of revenue.
• Emoji, Chinese QQ and other Asian whatsits.
• Apple’s big iPhone 3.0 announcement this week and order of 10″ touchscreens.
• Porting between cellular networks and service providers.
• MTN’s results for the last financial year.

And much more…

Our choice technologies of the week:

• Ben Kelly: Virtual Google Talk clients.
• Simon Dingle: Authoxy and Ping.fm.
• Brett Haggard: CheetahWatch.
• Candice Jones: BlackBerry Curve.
• Jon Tullett: Research for capturing keystrokes – no link, because we can’t find it on the normal Internet.

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The team this week consists of Jon Tullett, Duncan McLeod, Brett Haggard, Simon Dingle, Tiana Alswang and Rein Hillmann from CocoaHeads Johannesburg.

We discuss:

• The Xbox Live lag.
• CocoaHeads in SA – Rein tells us more.
• Software development in South Africa.
• Hands on with the BlackBerry Storm.
• Nokia’s music service and 5800 launching in South Africa.
• Some new game titles that are being released in March.
• Gaming on the Mac platform.
• OpenGL versus DirectX.
• The $20 laptop rumour.
• Telkom fires its COO.
• GTV goes under, strengthening Multichoice in Africa.
• The Apple television rumoured to be in development.
• Netbooks being helped along by the economic crisis.
• Seacom’s progress.

And much more…

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This week’s panel includes Simon Dingle, Jon Tullett from TechTarget and Saul Kropman from The Digital Edge podcast. On the cards:

• Netbook price discrepancies. Jon bought an Aspire One in the UK for next to nothing. Why are we paying through our teeth in SA?
• Tweaks and hacks for netbooks.
• Neotel’s NeoFlex Data offering being launched last week. We talk caps, prices and practical use.
• Informal collusion in South African tech pricing.
• We dive into Windows 7 Beta and Internet Explorer 8.
• Vista Service Pack 2 delayed.
• A new Worm threatens the world’s computers. Apparently.
• The Macintosh platform finally has a real virus doing the round. Again – apparently.
• MacOS X developer group CocoaHeads now has a South African chapter.
• Application roll-out on smartphones and the BlackBerry app store.
• Canonical is reaching its goal of becoming self-sustaining.
• Some of the Tech in the Obama inauguration, courtesy of CNN.

And much more…

We apologise for the cellular buzz that occurs in a section of this recording. It stops after a few minutes… we promise.

Direct file download (32MB)

A small group of geeks gathers for episode 45 of the ZA Tech Show in which we discuss:

• MTN and Neotel’s shared network deal.
• Steve Jobs taking a break as CEO of Apple.
• Windows 7.
• The netbook market. Is there one?
• Updates on legal matters at SITA.
• VANS license conversions taking place.
• Computer sales figures for 2008.
• Neotel’s NeoFlex Data is now available.
• Losses and cut-backs, including Google and Sony Ericsson.
• Picasa now available for Mac.

And much more…

Direct file download (26MB)