What you missed in Tech last week; A Techtrends Round-up

Last week a lot of things happened on the tech scene as usual, beginning with the launch of Airtel Zambia’s Trace Music Stars competition. The participants will be required to sing into their phone to stand a chance to win a place in the grand finale. Currently, 13 countries are taking part i.e. Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, DRC, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda & Zambia. The winners in each country get to meet global star Akon, get mentorship from him and sign with one of the world’s biggest labels, Universal Records, as well as win a stash of cash. Read more here.

Zambia is living in quite hard times, but that does’t mean we should manipulate each other and rip each other off, and it’s good to see authorities in various industries stepping up. The Zambia Information and Technology Authority (ZICTA) made it clear that traders of airtime and SIM cards of the 3 mobile network operators can not trade them at prices other than the stipulated price, that is, K5 for all SIM cards, and the actual value of the airtime voucher’s value e.g you can’t sell a K10 voucher for K11. More on this here.

Also in tech was the release of the Sony Xperia Z3, just 6 months after the Sony Xperia Z2, and seemingly better than its predecessor only for the fact that it has a faster processor. The rest of its features are still very similar to the Z2 so our conclusion was that you shouldn’t panic so much about upgrading. However, the Z3 will come with a Remote play feature that should attract gamers. The tag on the Z3 is also a little pricey so you can hold on to your Z2 for now and wait for a price drop later. More specifications are here.

We also had a telecoms guru  discuss what chances BlackBerry has of competing with the other major brands running on Android and iOS platforms, or whether all their juice has been squeezed out. Read the full story here. There are 4 factors to consider that any major tech company should know.

Microsoft also launched the Windows 10 operating system, shockingly skipping what we expected as Windows 9. They claimed they had made so much progress with it that naming it ‘9’ was underrating it. (Ok. If you say so Microsoft!). It has gotten rid of some of the features that came with Windows 8, which was not warmly received, and gone back to better features we recognized from Windows 7, just more modern.

We also received complaints about possible crosslining between Airtel and MTN numbers where a sender’s SMS went to a random number they didn’t intend for it to go to. A call to the MNOs yielded no answers right away and we have yet to receive an explanation. Tech still too complicated? No?

Lastly, with the recently hacked iClouds belonging to celebrities, we gave you 2 important tips on how to protect your cloud from being hacked. They are simple and are both here, regardless of what device you’re using or what cloud server you’re signed up for.

That was tech last week; looking forward to sharing more with you this week.