New smartphones from HTC, including the Legend and Desire are schedule for launch in South Africa on 12 April 2010. These and a range of other new models from the Taiwanese manufacturer were announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona in February.

The Desire is comparable to the Nexus One, which is manufactured by HTC and sold by Google. There are still no plans to launch the Nexus One in SA, but the Desire is a practically identical phone with the same 3.7″ AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera and, most importantly, Android 2.1 operating system that you’ll find on the Nexus One. (more…)

It’s official – video game company Valve announced today that its Steam gaming service is coming to the Mac, along with a native version of gaming engine Source that will bring with it popular titles such as the Half Life series, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Most important is the fact that Valve is not using emulation to make this all happen, as some suspected it would. Emulation would see the original versions of the games being played on the Mac in a spoofed Windows environment. Instead the developer has created a native version of its gaming engine – built for OS X. (more…)

On Wednesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced his company’s latest creation to the world – the iPad. With a 9.7″ capacitive touchscreen and an operating system similar to the iPhone, the iPad has been designed to fill the gap between smartphones and laptops. On a technological level the device is amazing. Equally amazing is the deal Apple has struck with AT&T in the USA to offer 3G data at $14.99 per month for 250MB and $29.99 for unlimited bandwidth. But I’m not convinced that the gap the iPad fills exists for all but a small niche of computer users at this stage. (more…)

The battle for differentiation in mobile is at fever pitch. iPhone has the app store, BlackBerry has cut-rate, unlimited internet access, Android has… well… Google and Nokia has a mounting collection of services that includes an extensive, and now entirely free, mapping solution.

Nokia Maps was an early play from the Finnish mobile giant that has put it ahead of the pack when it comes to affordable mapping and navigation on your phone.

The service has been mostly free for some time, offering maps of the world and their updates to Nokia users for gratis. Voice navigation and a few other bits and pieces were levied via subscription, however – but these are now free as part of the re-branded Ovi Maps product announced by Nokia this week. (more…)

Steve Jobs can’t even sigh without the rumour mill that has assembled itself around his brand speculating at what it could mean. This time the pseudo-media has decided that Fortune’s CEO of the decade and his company are about to launch a tablet device – and before the rumour was even confirmed there were articles decisively claiming what the product could and couldn’t do, specifying price – and one website even running a competition giving one away. Oh, and ridiculous Photoshop mockups are all over the place.

And all this for a device we know nothing about.

Well, that’s not entirely true. But we know very little at time of writing. Apple has booked a venue for an event in January at which they are expected to announce something. We have heard that the company has been working with 10.1″ capacitive touch-screens and at the last big Apple event Jobs said that they were working on “some amazing new products.” But those are the only hard facts we have to go on. The rest amounts to hearsay.

Some of it is compelling, however. It seems likely that Apple has been in negotiations with major publishing companies, suggesting that it intends to add the likes of books, magazines and newspapers to the iTunes store that already offers movies, TV shows, music and applications.
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