Arthur Goldstuck

1 week ago | gadget.co.za | Arthur Goldstuck

Smartwatches were supposed to liberate us from phones. Instead, they often added complexity to something as simple as checking the time or counting steps. So when Huawei introduced the Fit 4 Pro in Berlin earlier this month, it didn’t come draped in the usual “game-changer” clichés. That may be its biggest strength. What is it? At first glance, it looks like Huawei took a scalpel to its past watch designs. The Fit 4 Pro is wonderfully slim at 9.3mm.

1 week ago | gadget.co.za | Arthur Goldstuck

Advanced air mobility (AAM) company Wisk Aero is entering a five-year non-reimbursable space act agreement with NASA. This focuses on critical research led by NASA’s air traffic management exploration project aimed at advancing autonomous aircraft under instrument flight rules in the National Airspace System (NAS). Wisk was the first AAM company to develop an electric self-flying air taxi in the US. Its focus is on autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

1 week ago | gadget.co.za | Arthur Goldstuck

Once upon a time, Google tried to change the world. It launched Google Glass, which was in effect a computer and a video camera in one’s spectacles. As expected, the specs were ugly, the computer ineffectual, and the camera an invitation to have your face smashed in. I wrote back in 2013 that it “makes the user look like a 20th century watchmaker, and turns anyone in the vicinity of the user into a privacy-obsessed paranoiac.” That line aged far better than the product.

1 week ago | gadget.co.za | Arthur Goldstuck

A Volvo stood outside the keynote, engine off, systems on, and ready to talk. There was no label on the windscreen. No velvet rope. Just a production car running the Gemini AI model on Google built-in, parked between the developer queues and the Shoreline Amphitheatre stage. It didn’t introduce itself. It waited for instructions. That was the quiet announcement before the announcements at the Google I/O develop[er conference in Mountain View, California, last week.

1 week ago | gadget.co.za | Arthur Goldstuck

Google has detonated the foundation of the internet. Search, the product that defined the company and shaped how the web is navigated, is being re-engineered from the ground up. The blue links that funnel over half a trillion dollars in digital advertising are being pushed aside in favour of something more ambitious: an AI system that interprets, reasons, and acts. The announcement came at Google I/O 2025, the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco.