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Smart-phones are cool. Smart-phones change the way you interact with the web and online services, completely. Social services like Twitter and Facebook and FourSquare, are simply elevated to a whole new level, when you have a smart-phone in your hand. Add a great camera and GPS into the mix, and the smart-phone, for many, becomes almost all the personal computer you’ll ever need. But, there’s a downside. At least here in South Africa, smart-phones a̶r̶e̶ have been EXPENSIVE. But. Vodacom yesterday stepped up, and announced that they’ll be selling the lowest priced Android smartphone in South Africa.

How “lowest priced”? R1399 retail. Killer.

The phone is the Vodafone 845, which is a branded version of the Huawei “Joy” handset. It has very acceptable specs for an entry-level smart-phone. The 845 features Android 2.1/Eclair and supports GPRS/EDGE as well as 3G/HSDPA, and has Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi b/g, a digital compass and an accelerometer. The 2.8″, 262k colour, touch display supports the unusual QVGA resolution (320×240), and the camera is a 3.2 megapixel device.

Mark Taylor, of Vodacom SA, says: “Yet again we’ve been able to leverage the power of Vodafone to bring something unimaginable just a few years ago. This kind of functionality and design has never been available before at anything near this price. Android is a stunning platform which has become a favourite amongst developers worldwide and means that owners can never get bored with their VF845.”

Remember this post? D’you think $100 per computing device, aiming to change education, is a noble aspiration? Well, then you’re really going to love this. The tech-sphere has been awash with commentary, and all manner of skepticism lately, and it’s about this device:

At the price-point target of $35, the Indian government plans to have one million of the devices in Indian colleges and universities by 2011, says Indian Human Resource Development minister, Kapil Sibal. And, in an attempt to win over the (understandably) skeptical Western tech-press, they’ve been showing the device on TV, frequently. The effort has “the potential to lower the prices of tablets globally,” TechRadar claims. Of course, Microsoft and Google are both salivating at the prospect, and maneuvering to have their respective OS software powering the device, but given the price point, I can’t see where even Microsoft could find space for a license fee. Android, anyone?

Even finding costs for the spare parts required to build this thing, beggars belief. Seriously? S-u-b-s-i-d-y. That’s the only way this is going to fly. “it’s just an exercise in awkward PR and bloody-mindedness that absolutely won’t change global tablet pricing.”. Agreed.

Less than a fortnight after the release of the Beta 2, Mozilla this week popped out the next Beta iteration of their widely-used and much beloved, Firefox 4 product. Eager advocates with stong stomachs (ie some tolerance for crashes and bugs) can get it here.

Big HUGE news in this release is the inclusion of Touch. Used on a touch-screen device, your Firefox web-browser will now respond to many touch gestures, including pinch, rotate etc. Booyah!

From the marketing change list on the Mozilla blog:
“Multi-touch: Firefox 4 Beta now has multi-touch support for Windows 7, to enable people to
interact with Web content with their hands naturally. Developers can use multi-touch capabilities to leverage touch-enabled devices and provide people with an intuitive and fun browsing experience. For more details, see the blog posts by Paul Rouget and Felipe Gomes.”

There’s a very cool demo video on YouTube, showing some of the the Touch features.

Apparently, the next beta will also be released in the coming weeks. That’s a blistering pace of development from the Mozilla team!

Great news!

Incredible Connection is having a insane, cut-price gaming sale, at many of it’s stores! Hundreds of titles have had their prices slashed. And when we say “slashed” we mean TO THE BONE. We’re talking R99.95 and R149.95 price points. If you’re quick, you can save up R350 on Nintendo DS, Wii, PlayStation, PlayStation2 and PC titles, and as much as R500 on XBox and PlayStation3 titles!

And. There’s hardware on sale as well. Pick up a Wii bundle with Sports pack, remote, nunchuck, Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports Resort and Wii Sport, for only R3995.95 and you’ll get a free DS Lite! And, the price of DS Lite’s are cut as well, at R1199.95. That’s a saving of R200.

Click on the thumbs below to download the PDF flyers with more information:

Of course, stocks are limited, and not all stores have ALL titles, so stop reading this NOW and get down to one of the following Incredible Connection stores:
Alberton,Canal Walk, Eastgate, East Rand Retail, Gateway, Menlyn, Polokwane, Sandton, The Glen, and Woodmead. Go!

Disclaimer: This is SO a rumor, but the rumors have been circulating for-e-vah, so, lets dip our toes in the speculation pond!

The current dimensions of the rumor are: An iPhone 4 hardware-based (A4 CPU, 16GB of flash storage) device, running an incarnation of Apple’s iOS software, with applications in the iPhone/iPad metaphor, and (in the time-honoured Apple tradition) tied into an iTunes-type service, so that users can stream/rent/buy movies and other content. Named? The iTV.

Sounds good? Yes, except… The ugly downside of rumors, is that they’re just that. Rumors, and as such, all kinds of unkind folks are free to add their speculation to the pile. And that’s whats happening with this one. APPARENTLY the A4 processor can’t quite handle 1080p or 1080i playback. And so, the iTV will be limited to 720p HD output. Really? Not sure whether to take this part of the rumor seriously, though. After all, even the iPhone 3GS can play back full HD video, no?

And, what’s with that name? We’ve been round this bush once before. When the Apple TV was originally announced, it was called iTV. It didn’t take long for that tiny little British TV network to cough politely and say, “I say, old chap…”, and I can’t belive they’d just turn a blind eye this time. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see…