Life & Technology – 2GB 11th October, 2015

Microsoft made a pretty surprising announcement this week; in addition to unveiling the new and improved Surface Pro 4, Microsoft revealed its first ever laptop: the Surface Book. The Surface Book is a 13.5-inch laptop designed to go head on with the likes of the MacBook Pro, the HP Spectre x360, and Toshiba’s Radius 12. It’s a beastly ultrabook featuring Intel’s latest 6th generation processors, discrete NVIDIA graphics, and up to 16GB of RAM. Better yet, you can pop the screen off and use it as a tablet. As such, it’s also comes with the Surface Pen. 

 

It looks great, and we’re really excited to get our hands on one when it launches locally on November 12. It will retail start at AUD$2,229 in Australia.

 

NBN has launched its first broadband satellite and it will go live early next year. The satellite will deliver ADSL to rural and regional Australia, and should be able to deliver speeds of up to 25Mbps to most users. This map shows which areas will be covered by satellite

 

I know there’s been more than a few people who’ve been waiting for this news: Australian streaming service Stan now has its app available on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. The same app will also be made available for Samsung Smart TVs before the end of the year, and the upcoming Telstra TV-branded Roku player.

 

Huawei is bringing out a few new devices to Australia shortly, including a new phone and tablet. Its Android Wear smartwatch, the Huawei Watch, is the first, and will be available this Thursday from Harvey Norman. It's very pretty – easily one of the nicest smartwatches on the market – and we'll have a review on CyberShack in the coming days. In the mean time, here's pricing information. 

 

PayPal recently released some research saying that one fourth of Australians won't shop at cash only venues anymore, so this week we had a chat to Dr. Angus Hervey, the co-founder of Future Crunch, about the death of cash and the future of money. For the full story, check out the podcast. 

 

The iPhone 6s has been out for just about two weeks now, so we’ve had a chance to put it through the paces If you like iPhones, you’ll love it. The depth-sensing 3D Touch screen is very cool, and could enable some interesting “pro apps”, 2GB of RAM makes it a lot faster, and as you’d expect, the camera is good.

 

However, if you’re looking at the smaller iPhone, the iPhone 6s as opposed the iPhone 6s Plus, we’ve found that it’s still pretty easy to run down the battery life. Some days, we’d be giving it a top up by 7pm. Admittedly, we’re very heavy smartphone users, but if you’re in the same boat you might want to consider the 6s Plus instead, or an Android with a removable battery like LG’s G4.

 

For our full review of the iPhone 6s, click here.