Techzim

Zimbabwe and regional technology news and updates


Global Device Shipments Expected To Grow 0.9% in 2020

Worldwide shipments of devices — PCs, tablets and mobile phones — will total 2.16 billion units in 2020, an increase of 0.9% from 2019, according to Gartner, Inc. In 2019, global shipments of devices totalled 2.15 billion units. 2020 will witness a slight market recovery. Increased availability of 5G handsets will boost mobile phone replacements, […]


Trump Says We Helped Apple With Trade, They Should Help Us Catch Criminals

President Trump… What can I say about the fella that hasn’t already been said? He loves Twitter tirades and it seems his next target in that regard is Apple. We are helping Apple all of the time on TRADE and so many other issues, and yet they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug […]


Cogent Blocked By ARIN For Spamming Users

Cogent has a seemingly neverending list of scandals surrounding its company, the latest of which sees ARIN lose its temper and ban Cogent from accessing its WHOIS database. But who is Cogent, you ask? Well, they are the third largest Internet connectivity provider in the world. You probably haven’t heard of them, but that’s okay, […]


Facebook To Start Taking Down “Deepfake” Videos

Manipulated media is one of the most dangerous forms that fake news can take. We’ve talked about deepfakes before and the horror of deepfakes comes from the fact that they can make it appear as if you or anyone else said or did something they didn’t do at all. Unlike other forms of fake news […]


Huawei Launches Developer Integration Program In South Africa

As you probably know by now – Huawei was banned from using American services and products and that means their phones are now being released without Google Services and Google Applications – which is a huge blow. To mitigate the impact of the ban Huawei initiated their own Huawei Mobile Services but the only problem […]


Chrome Browser Now Has Dark Mode… Sort Of

Back in May, we shared a hack that Google Chrome users on Android could use to access a version of dark mode, but that hack made for a pretty compromised experience as it was forcefully changing the way websites appear. Google Chrome’s latest update now supports a darker theme which comes with less issues than […]


Tik Tok’s Parent Company Announces First Smartphone

Tik Tok is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world right now with close to 1.5 billion users worldwide. It seems Tik Tok’s parent company -Byte Dance- is broadening its horizon and entering the smartphone space. The company just announced its first phone Smartisan Nut Pro 3 (no I’m not kidding […]


A City In California Has Banned The State From Acquiring Facial Recognition Tech

A year ago, it was announced that the City of Harare and many other cities in the country would start making use of facial recognition technology to monitor crime and traffic. At the time we raised eyebrows regarding whether or not this would lead to abuse of such technology by our government (which has a […]


Old Mutual SA Adopting AWS Cloud Services

Old Mutual has struck a deal with Amazon Web Services which will see the financial services group move a significant portion of its IT workload to the cloud. Components being moved to the cloud will include; Digital customer platforms core insurance applications product administration systems Old Mutual will migrate over a thousand applications to AWS […]


Chinese Communist Party Android App Caught Spying On 100 Million People

Cure53 researchers discovered that an Android app that was released by the Chinese Communist Party to push its propaganda is basically spyware. Called “Study the Great Nation”, this app is so popular in China such that at least 100 million people have downloaded it from China’s Google Playstore. The app is only available in China […]


Microsoft Confirms You’ll Be Able To Receive Calls From Your Phone On Your Computer Soon

An update coming to Window’s Your Phone app will add some major functionality to the application that connects your device to your computer. In its current form, the application already gives you access to photos on your phone, along with access to notifications and messages. Next up on the list of features coming to Your […]


U.S. Government Bans 8 More Chinese Tech Firms

The United States government is not at a war with Huawei but a trade war with China and its technology sector in particular. In a move that didn’t surprise anyone really, a host of Chinese facial recognition, AI, and data forensics firms have been added to the “entity list”, which is the blacklist of the […]


Sanctions Affecting Adobe Users In Venezuela

Being one of the countries under US sanctions will get to affect Venezuelan content creators who use Adobe tools when the company ceases to offer their services in the country towards the end of this month. The US government issues an executive order in August prohibiting trade with the country. Unfortunately for Venezuelan Adobe paid […]


iPhone 6S Component Failure Leading To Failure To Turn On The Device

We all know how popular second-hand phones – especially iPhones are in Zim. Unfortunately, if you have an iPhone 6S that was manufactured between October 2018 and August 2019 you might run into serious trouble. The Apple devices manufactured during this period might be affected by component failure which leads to failure to turn on. […]


Opera’s Gaming Browser Uses Less RAM and CPU Power Than The Normal Opera

Opera recently announced the GX browser and it’s targeted at gamers and comes with features such as a performance control centre, themes as well as twitch integration. The truth is I’m not a PC gamer so I’m not best placed to review such a product. Because this is the case I’ll just be taking a […]


Microsoft Announces Two New Foldable Devices: Surface Neo & Duo

Foldables are definitely a thing that. If Huawei’s Mate & Samsung’s Galaxy Fold weren’t enough to convince you that this is the future that manufacturers are heading towards, Microsoft’s two new foldables might just do that. Duo In this day and age to be able to announce two new products without leaked renders or an […]


Your Next Android Phone Won’t Have Google Play Music Pre-Installed

As much as Google is a success, their music and video services have been train smashes. Google Play Music will be getting discontinued and replaced by YouTube Music as the preinstalled music player on Android devices with Android 10 and higher. It’s a pretty interesting move since Google is replacing one uninspiring application with another […]


Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha Looks Like Something From The Future

When foldable phones started getting announced, a number of people questioned whether these phones are necessary. I’m sure Xiaomi’s Mi Mix Alpha will get the same reception due to its futurist appearance. The phone has a display that wraps around and is only interrupted by a camera strip used to house the 108 MP camera […]


Andela To Focus More On Senior Developers, Over 400 Junior Developers Laid Off

Andela – the African engineering-as-a-service giant- will be drastically changing it’s approach going forward. In a detailed blog post, Andela CEO and co-founder Jeremy Johnson shared why the company is shifting focus and what the short term impact of that move will be. Whilst Mr Johnson maintains his belief that “brilliance is evenly distributed but […]


Samsung Considering Merging The Galaxy Note And S Devices

If you’re like me, you would have seen this headline and been extremely excited. I’ve never fully understood why the Galaxy Note existed and if I had my pick I would go with Samsung’s S series of flagships any day. Apparently, these same debates are raging within Samsung if Evan Blass (a leakster who’s usually […]


Apple Sues A Start-up For Selling Copies Of iOS and iPhone Apps

Apple is taking legal action against a company named Correllium for making an iPhone emulator. Correllium’s virtual iPhone service allowed anyone to run Apple’s latest operating systems on PC as soon as they get released by paying Correllium. Apple claims that Correllium has been encouraging its customers to sell the vulnerabilities to black hat hackers. […]


Huawei’s Harmony OS Finally Official

Back in 2017, Huawei started work on their own operating system – Harmony. Had it not been for Trump and tensions between his country and China, maybe the announcement of that OS would have been a surprise. Instead, the OS comes on the back of months of speculation and debate as to whether it is […]


8Chan fallout causes collapse of CDN & DDoS specialist

Yesterday we reported that the notorious ‘free-speech’ site 8Chan was booted from Cloudflare’s service, where it hid behind layers of Cloudflare’s Anti-DDoS and Web Application Firewall technologies to stay online. Today we’ve learned that the fallout between 8Chan and Cloudflare has resulted in the collapse of an alternative Cloudflare-like DDoS, CDN and WAF specialist hosting […]


Apple Acquires Intel’s 5G Smartphone Modem Business

Confirming recent reports, Apple has officially announced that it has signed an agreement with Intel to acquire the majority of the latter’s smartphone modem business for $1 billion. In a press release on Thursday, the iPhone maker said that around 2,200 Intel employees will join its ranks as part of the deal, along with intellectual […]


Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 Sells 15 Million Units In 6 Months

Xiaomi is fast becoming an extremely popular brand globally. The company has always been quite popular in China and India but it seems the number of people looking to have their phones is growing. The Redmi Note 7 which was announced back in January has been selling quite well. In fact, Xiaomi has managed to […]


Huawei’s CEO Says Hong Meng Is Faster Than Android & MacOS, But App Availability Concerns Still Unaddressed

The CEO of Huawei Ren Zhengfei, has said that the Operating System they are working on internally -HongMeng OS- is faster than Android and MacOs. Not only did he claim that the OS will be faster, he also said it will have more application than Android. Application in this context probably means it will do […]


Israel Power Company Urged Fortnite To Remove Pole Climbing In Their Game As It Could Dangerously Influence Kids

In one of the more absurd stories I’ve come across in recent memory, Israel’s power company asked Fortnite to remove pole-scaling from their popular online game, as this could encourage dangerous behaviour asking children. The reasoning by the power company is that if children can climb poles in their favourite game, they might try scaling […]


Google And Facebook Building Infrastructure To Take Millions Of Africans Online

There’ been a lot of talk regarding the opportunities that are in Africa right now. With a population projected to continue growing and a significant lack of development, one can understand why there’s so much anticipation. Google and Facebook seem to be eyeing the continent as well, and their projects are internet related which might […]


Android’s Budget Go Devices Sales Thought To Be High As Google Go App Passes 100 Million Install Mark

When Google announced the Android Go program there were many questions regarding the impact of such a program and whether it would finally put decent, secure and affordable devices made by reputable manufacturers in the hands of consumers. It seems that’s the case, as the number of times Google’s Go app has been downloaded is […]


Apple & Other Global Companies Request US Government Not To Impose Tariffs On Their Products

A number of tech companies in the US have written to the Trump Administration this week asking the government NOT to hit the products they produce with additional tariffs as the US-China trade war seems to be on the verge of escalating. When Trump’s administration put Huawei under a trade ban a few weeks ago, […]