Stuff Magazine South Africa

Welcome to this smartphone special issue of Stuff! Long-time readers will know that once a year we like to get all our phones out on the table and pit them ainst each other in a massive supertest. What’s remarkable this year is just how much you can get for your money both in the mid-rane and at the budget end of the spectrum. More than ever, you can get a lot for less – and that can only be a good thing. It’s also our load-shedding issue. It’s a cheerless subject and it’s going to give many South Africans a cheerless winter. We can help with that: you can greatly improve your life by investing in some of the load-shedding tech in our feature, all presented without a single bad loadshedding…

HOT FIVE #1 THIS IS WHY WE CAN HAVE NICE THINS Asus Zenbook S 13 OLED Hydrogen, helium, methane and neon are just some of the gases that are lighter than air - but if you're looking for a laptop that weighs less than a MacBook Air, there aren't that many options on the periodic table of computers. At just 1kg, the Asus Zenbook S13 OLED makes the list by nearly a quarter of a kilo - and at 1cm thick it's13mm skinnier too. That doesn't mean it's just full of hot air either. Pick the top-spec model and you get a 13th-gen Intel i7-1355U processor that's good for 5GHz peak speeds, plus integrated Iris Xe graphics, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and 1TB of PCIe 4.0 storage. The OLED screen's worth a look…

Rtba(R10.3m, import)/lamborghini.com Is Lamborghini getting sensible? Read the many headlines about this car and you might think so. But thanks to the company’s Usual over-the-top Italian styling, and some fearsome performance figures that we’ll come to in a: minute, the Revuelto - successor to the Aventador - seems to be about as sensible as bullfighting. But it is going green… Well, the Italian supercar maker is having a go. The Revuelto packs a 6.5L naturally aspirated V12, which isn’tyery green; but the engineers have combined it with a 3.8kWh lithium-ion battery pack and a trio of electric motors. That means you can enjoy no less than 1001bhp in a car that’s a plug-in hybrid. Super, but isn't that a little at odds with the whole point of owning a Lamborghini? Not Necessarily, First of all, the…

GAMESIR PROMISES NO MORE TEARS IN SWITCH KINGDOM Having problems with joy stick drift on your Nintendo Switch? GameSir’s colourful T4 Kaleid controller (£35, gamesir.hk) has ‘Hall effect’ sticks and triggers that don’t suffer from the same Issue, so Link won’t start wandering off on his own when you play the new Zelda ULTION'S NEW KEYPAD IS ALL FINGERS AND SUMS It might sound like a Star Trek villain, but the Ultion Nuki is a smart lock - and it can now be made even smarter with a wireless combined fingerprint sensor and keypad that can remember up to 200 custom codes. You can get one for ah extra R3 320, or as a set with the lock itself for R9 000. KOBO'S LATEST E-READER HAS A KINDLE SCRIBE VIBE Want an ebook reader you…

Rtba/ acer.com/za Acer’s new Chromebook shows Google-powered laptops are longer just a weedy make-do option • Chrome-coming queen Chromebooks used to just be budget laptops that would start wheezing if you asked them to do much more than play a YouTube video, but these days they’re available with just as much muscle as any Windows machine. Acer’s latest Spin 714 certainly isn’t short of power, with a choice of 13th-gen Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs paired with 8, 16 or 32GB of RAM. Storage starts with a 128GB SSD, but can be upgraded to 256 or 512GB – or a 1TB gen4 SSD with double the data transfer speeds if you really want to go kerrr-azy. • Thriving Chrome for crispness A 360° hinge lets you use the Spin 714 as a laptop…

The Five Devils This dark French drama deals with time, trauma, motherhood Ml the connection between scent and memory. Yes, we’re all moved by the opening of afresh packet of Wotsits, but what if you had a nose so sensitive a whiff of something could send you back to witness your mother’s life-changing moments… and even affect them? Film / Mubi,12 May American Born Chinese Disney’s action-comedy series is an Everything Everywhere All at Once reunion, with Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu all appearing - but the show’s star is the unknown Ben Wang, who plays a schoolkid sucked into an epic supernatural struggle bet ween the gods and monsters of Chinese mythology. S1 / Disney+, 24 May The Mother The ‘ageing elite assassin forced out of retirement’ trope might be as threadbare as…