SPLICED Magazine Issue 01 Oct/Nov 2013 | Page 12

SPLICED TECH / Gadgets, Glorious Gadgets ISSUE 01 Sony Xperia Z1 Quite possibly the new king of the Androids (smartphones, that is), the Xperia Z1 is fully waterproof, shatter resistant and scratch resistant. And the glass and aluminum body makes it a pretty sexy looking piece of tech too. It features a super bright full HD display, a ridiculously impressive quad-core processor, and a 20.7 megapixel camera. Its battery life might not be as impressive as the Galaxy S4’s, but it’s difficult to hold too serious a grudge based on this alone. Rocking the latest version of Android on a 5 inch display screen, this guy is setting the bar preeeeetty high for its competitors. R9,899 / www.sonymobile.com/za Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom When the term “camera phone” was coined, we’re pretty certain this was never the intention. But Samsung have thrown caution to the wind and taken things more literally. The Galaxy S4 Zoom is a quasi S4 mobile phone slash Galaxy Camera hybrid. It features a 4.3”qHD AMOLED display, a 16MP camera, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and NFC, and an expandable memory of up to 64GB via MicroSD to store all those pretty pictures. It also features an manual optical zoom control with a 10X optical zoom and optical image stabilization. And together with the automatic mode function, picture quality is definitely something to write home about. But most notably, it’s a massive novelty. Price: R5,999 / www.samsung.com/za 12