When Apple announced the launch of their new iPhone 4S, South Africans has been holding thumbs that just maybe the iPhone 4S would launch here. Unfortunately as with most tech products, South Africa is not always on top of the list to get things first.

Apple then announced the second launch wave of the iPhone 4S to a few additional countries and yet again South Africa was left behind, but it seems like we are in for a Christmas surprise.

Vodacom yesterday revealed in a tweet that they will be launching the iPhone 4S in South Africa on 16 December 2011. Rumors was doing the rounds that the iPhone 4S would have launched on 30 November 2011, but later industry players stated that the launch was postponed to December.

MTN has also responded and said that they will also be launching the iPhone 4S on 16 December, but pricing are yet to be confirmed.

If you are a Vodacom customer or would like to become one you can pre-register for a iPhone 4S here.

At an event in Johannesburg last night, Motorola Mobility, has launched the world’s thinnest smartphone, the Motorola RAZR, in South Africa.

The South African launch comes only a mere week after Motorola announced the Motorola RAZR to the public internationally, showing that Motorola really has put more focus on marketing and bringing their latest devices to the country.

Owning the title of the world’s thinnest smartphone one would have expected Motorola to skimp on hardware power, but this is not the case with the RAZR. The Motorola RAZR features an 1.2GHZ dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, an 8MP camera and a gorgeous large 4.3″ AMOLED screen.

Apart from the impressive hardware features the RAZR also comes with an array of consumer experiences which Motorola considers to of high importance, seeing as they currently have more engineers working on this then on the hardware itself.

A nice consumer experience is the smart actions that learns a users habits on the phone and then automatically adjust the phone settings according to your habits to ensure longer battery life.

The RAZR is also compatible with the Lapdock and the HD Multimedia Station Motorola introduced with the Atrix.

The Motorola RAZR will be available at Vodacom from November 2011 on a 24-month Business Call contract at R269 or at a retail price of R6999, which too be honest is a bit on the steep side.

Since the acquisition of local group buying startup Twangoo by Groupon, the local group buying scene has grown at a tremendous rate with new sites popping up each month.

Currently South Africans have access to almost 30 group buying coupon sites, with everyone from celebrities, newspaper companies to airlines trying to get a piece of the pie. However for the consumer all these group buying sites can be a nightmare, cause signing up to 30 sites could get your inbox spammed severely every day and having to visit each site could take up some time.

This is where the group buying aggregators comes into play, South Africa currently has 6 group buying deal aggregators operating and what they do is collect all the deals from all the different group buying sites and display them in one central place. But how are they making money doing this? Affiliates.

Some of these group buying sites mask links and then redirect you to the deals with their affiliate links on, I see nothing wrong with that as it costs money and allot of effort to operate a site, but according to some of the group buying sites they aggregate’s terms of use, this may be illegal.

Quoting the following point from the Groupon API TOS Non-Permitted Purposes; API Restrictions: “use the API to aggregate, consolidate or otherwise arrange, display or make available Groupon Content in combination with any third party or any Groupon competitors’ content, for any commercial purpose or in any manner that Groupon determines could diminish the value or integrity of its business or brand;”

What this basically say is that you may not aggregate Groupon deals, and you may not display it in combination with other competitors (other group buying sites) deals. And currently all the local group buying aggregators are doing this.

My question is did any of these aggregators read through the different group buying sites terms of use? And do you think its fair to have statements like that in your terms of use? I mean these aggregators are really doing these group buying sites a favour by promoting their deals.

I for one welcome these aggregators as it makes my task easy in finding great deals on a daily basis.

Check out the following group buying deal aggregators:
AllDeals
Today’s Deals
Deal Checker
DealSpade
Yadda
Deal Africa
DealTracker
DealZone

Motorola has announced the availability of the Motorola XOOM Android tablet and the Motorola Atrix in South Africa.

The Motorola XOOM is the first tablet to run Android 3 Honeycomb, boasts a dual core Tegra 2 1Ghz processor, 1GB DDR2 RAM and 32GB of internal storage. Motorola South Africa has also confirmed that an update for Android 3.1 is available for the XOOM in South Africa.

The Motorola Atrix is a 4G dual core CPU phone running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, however the device will not be branded as 4G in South Africa. What really makes the Atrix stand out from all the other dual core phones currently on the market is its Webtop application combined with the docking station. Plugging the Atrix into the docking station enables you to control the device with a normal keyboard and mouse.

The Motorola XOOM and Atrix will be available with Cell C, Vodacom, MTN and 8ta in August 2011. The recommended retail price for the Motorola XOOM is R6599 and R5799 for the Atrix, both devices will also be available on contract.

8ta, South Africa’s newest cellular operator has just dropped the bomb on rival cellphone network operators by introducing the cheapest mobile broadband package available in South Africa.

The new 8ta deal called Internet 5 will give subscribers access to 10GB of bandwidth at only R199 per month, and for an additional R100 users can get another 10GB that can be used between 12AM and 5AM.

This new deal from 8ta undercuts the current deals by Cell C, MTN and Vodacom that offers customers a mere 2GB of bandwidth per month for R149, by a large margin.

The 10GB package from 8ta for R199 per month will be available at all 8ta flagship stores from 26 June 2011, users will need to sign a 24 month contract and the deal is only applicable on 8ta base stations and not where 8ta uses MTN coverage to serve its customers.

To see if you are covered for the 8ta 10GB package see the Internet 5 coverage map.

A while back Leaf the local distributor of HTC phones in South Africa announced that South Africa will be getting access to Paid Android Apps, Google last night confirmed this by announcing at their I/O conference that full Android Market access will be coming to South Africa and an additional 98 other countries.

As of last night some South African users have reported to already have access to paid applications on the Android Market, I however checked and could only find one paid application namely QuickOffice Pro that is going for R68.73. I also tried buying apps through the online Android web store, but this did not work either.

In the mean time while we wait for the service to roll out fully to all South Africa users you can set up a Google Checkout Account, as that will be used to pay for your applications.

It has been a hot topic of debate, when will we see the white iPhone 4? After the successful launch of the iPhone 4 in September 2010 in South Africa, consumers have been asking when they could get their hand on the white iPhone 4.

Apple officially made available the white iPhone 4 last month in the US and it seems that South Africans wanting to get their hand on the device won’t have to wait that long.

MTN which launched the iPhone 4 here in South Africa at really affordable prices last year is again at it by being the first to introduce the white iPhone 4 to South Africa.

“From as little as R309 a month, with a 150MB data bundle included, MTN customers can experience world-class internet in their pockets,” says Serame Taukobong, chief marketing officer at MTN South Africa.

The white iPhone 4 will be available at MTN stores from 20 May 2011 without any pre-registrations.

QR Codes are one of the most used 2D barcode platforms in the world, first used in Japan in 1994 the barcode platform has seen significant usage specially in countries like Japan and South Korea.

Initially used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing the technology has since made its way into marketing with allot of companies running ad campaigns with these QR Codes in them.

South African uptake has been slow but it seems more and more local companies are starting to make use of QR codes in their advertising campaigns, the latest to do so is Soft Drink giant Coca Cola, Woolworth also recently ran a window promotion using QR Codes, but it’s not only the big guys making use of the technology, smaller businesses like iThemba Computers for example are also making use of them in their flyers and advertisements.

How QR Codes work is by embedding links or text inside a series black squares and then users can use their cellphone with a barcode reader app to translate the barcode and show them either the webpage or text embeded inside the barcode which either gives users more details about the promotion of could provide discount through coupon codes.

What are your favourite local QR Code campaigns?

Following the huge success of the first generation iPad, Apple recently released their successor the iPad 2.

South Africans had to wait almost a year before the iPad was released locally, in fact the first generation iPad was released in South Africa a mere 2 months before the release of the iPad 2 internationally. Good news is that this time around we will not have to wait that long.

Apple has announced in a press release that they will be launching the Apple iPad 2 in 12 other countries during this week and that includes South Africa.

Core, the local distributor for Apple products has also made recommended retail pricing available on their website from as low as R4399 for the 16GB iPad 2 Wi-Fi version.

The iPad 2 will be available in South Africa from 29 April 2011 at the following retail touch points:
Apple Premium Resellers
Digicape Cape Town
iStore Canal Walk
iStore Clearwater
iStore Gateway
iStore Melrose Arch
iStore Menlyn
iStore 1 Sandton Drive
iStore Sandton City
iStore Vodaworld
iStore Waterfront
Project 3

Incredible Connection
Incredible Connection Bloemfontein
Incredible Connection Canal Walk
Incredible Connection Cavendish
Incredible Connection Centurion
Incredible Connection Cresta
Incredible Connection East Rand Retail Park
Incredible Connection Eastgate
Incredible Connection Fourways
Incredible Connection Gateway
Incredible Connection Menlyn
Incredible Connection Nelspruit
Incredible Connection Pavillion
Incredible Connection Sandton
Incredible Connection Somerset West
Incredible Connection The Glen
Incredible Connection Woodmead

Dion Wired
Dion Wired Bedford Square
Dion Wired Fourways
Dion Wired Gateway
Dion Wired Hyde Park
Dion Wired Somerset West
Dion Wired Woodlands
Dion Wired Woodmead

Leaf, the HTC distributor in South Africa has just announced that the HTC Sensation is headed for South Africa.

The HTC Sensation which features an aluminium unibody design, 4.3″ Super LCD and 1.2GHz dual-core CPU, along with all HTC phones in the 2011 lineup, will be available in South Africa.

Although HTC South Africa did not give exact release dates, we can expect the HTC phones which includes the HTC ChaCha, Salsa, Wildfire S, Desire S, Incredible S and Android tablet, Flyer,  from the second quarter of 2011.

The phone I am looking forward to the most has to be the HTC Sensation, the first dual-core Android phone by HTC which runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and features a massive 768MB of RAM.