Episode 5 of ZA Tech Show sees a well fed crew of Simon Dingle, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett, Duncan McLeod and Ben Kelly discussing the following:

• The break-up of Motorola
• Seagate’s threats surrounding solid-state drives
• USB 3.0 and its rival Firewire
• Microsoft’s ‘Albany’
• Other online applications including Photoshop and Picnic
• Google Talk’s new web widget
• The next round of voting for the OOXML document format
• New search-engine Searchme.com
• The future of online search and social-bookmarking
• Sony’s optional removal of bloatware from its laptops
• The new 9″ Eee PC from Asus
• New chip technology from AMD and Intel (and Brett’s remarkable knowledge of silicon)
• Software nostalgia (Simon and Duncan can tell you all about Space Quest. Seriously)

So make with the downloads. It’s free.

Direct file download.

This week Simon Dingle, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod spend a Good Friday morning discussing:

• The passing of Arthur C. Clarke
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1
• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• The rumors surrounding Windows 7
• Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) beta
• A new virus threat surrounding zip files
• MTN’s performance in the Middle East
• Telkom’s new Metro LAN offering
• West coast versus East coast bandwidth
• The ‘all you can eat’ iTunes rumor
• How music publishing and distribution are evolving in the digital age

…and some other stuff in-between.

Direct file download.

Jon’s away in Boston this week but Ben, Simon, Duncan and Brett spent Friday afternoon drinking beer and discussing, amongst other things:

• Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3
• The enigma that is Steve Ballmer
• The Xbox 360 price-cut
• The iPhone SDK
• Eassy getting the green-light
• Neotel’s consumer offerings
• DSTV’s price-hike

Oh, you’ll also need to watch this, we discuss it in the show:

Click here for direct file download (you might have to right click and select to download the target file).

In this episode of ZATS, Ben Kelly joins us via Skype all the way from Palo Alto in the USA with Simon Dingle, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod in Johannesburg. We discuss the following:

• HP Labs
• New chip announcements from Intel and AMD
• The future of mobile computing and graphics hardware
• Console vs. PC gaming
• Frets on Fire
• Sentech discontinuing MyWireless
• Alan Knott-Craig stepping down as group CEO of Vodacom
• iPhone triangulation in SA
• Google’s local offerings
• Submarine cable policy
• Cloud computing
• Document security
• Adobe AIR
• Microsoft Silverlight
• The Xbox 360 Blu-ray player
• Xbox Live in SA

Click here for direct file download (you might have to right-click and select ’save target as’).

This is the first ever episode of ZA Tech Show! Simon Dingle, Ben Kelly, Brett Haggard, Jon Tullett and Duncan McLeod sit around on a Friday afternoon and discuss the death of HD DVD, the coming of high definition television to South Africa, the local broadband situation, Vista SP1 and other pressing technology issues.

We’d love to hear what you think of our first show - all criticism, praise and worship is welcome. Click here to mail us or alternatively leave a comment below…

You can use our embedded audio player (above) to stream this episode, alternatively:

- Download the audio file.
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- Subscribe to ZATS via iTunes. (Using this link requires that you have iTunes installed. Seriously).

We’ve been talking about it so long, it was bound to happen - last week Friday we finally ran out of excuses and recorded the first episode of the ZA Tech Show…

And to be honest it went far better than most of us though it would. Our panel consisted of Simon Dingle from Hypertext Media, Duncan McLeod from the FM and FM Tech, Jon Tullett from IHS, Benedict Kelly from Finweek and me, Brett Haggard also from Hypertext Media.

Topics we discussed included the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war finally being over, when Multichoice is going HD (and if we should even care), Internet connectivity options, the situation with undersea cables, Vista’s instability, Macs (and how they rock) and tons more…

If you’re here, it’s probably because you’ve been asked by one of the pundits to give us a listen, some critique and guidance/advice.

Watch this space for future updates to ZATS!