Bucket Tech: Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Preview

With the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked Event just around the corner, Samsung have decided to whet our appetite with what we can expect from their latest range of devices and technological advancements. 

Turning a photo from day to night in seconds. Restoring missing parts of objects in images – like a bite taken out of a cake. Seamlessly merging multiple photos into a single, cohesive result. These are the kinds of creative capabilities that once required professional skills or hours of editing. Now they’re about to become possible in minutes, directly from a phone, by simply asking in your own words.

That’s the next evolution of the Galaxy camera: an end-to-end experience with the brightest Galaxy camera system ever as the foundation.

 Mobile cameras are moving beyond capture alone and the latest Galaxy AI experiences bring advanced creative capabilities together in one intuitive place, unifying capture, editing, and sharing into a seamless experience. The result is a more fluid creative process – eliminating the need to switch between apps or navigate complex tools, so creativity feels faster, simpler, and more natural.

At the core of this evolution is the belief that creativity should not be limited by technical skill or experience. From shooting to editing, the phone camera has quietly redefined what’s possible. Now anyone can create cinematic movies, track stars across the night sky, or capture richly detailed photos – even in low light. And with natural, multimodal input, editing becomes as easy as using a few words to express what you have in mind.

Stay tuned for the easiest and most user-friendly Galaxy camera experience yet, unveiling next week at Galaxy Unpacked February 2026.

Bucket Tech: Huawei Y5p

With the "new norm" now being in full effect with everyone adjusting to working from home, and doing things differently, technology has played a big part in making this transition less problematic than normal. This unfortunately comes at a price, a high one most of the time but in the effort to get everyone being able to access such, Huawei has continued to its commitment of making technology more accessible to everyone with the launch of their Y5p, the most affordable phone yet. The new entry level device stems from the Y Series range has been designed to offer a large display, long-lasting battery and a good amount of storage for users. It has Huawei's EMUI's intuitive user experience, Huawei's high-quality product DNA, and their affordable pricing, the Huawei Y Series smartphones have been widely favoured by consumers around the world, including South Africa. 

Some of the key featured of the Y5p is the large 5.45  inch LCD FullView Display gives exceptional viewing experience, displays content in vibrant colours and has a screen-to-body ration of 81.2 percent. Memory wise, the Huawei Y5p comes with a standard 2GB RAM and 32GB of storage ensuring you have enough space for all your favourite apps, games and to store all the pictures and videos you will be capturing with it, speaking camera the device has an 8MP rear camera and a 5MP front facing selfie camera. The rear main camera supports HDR mode which will automatically adjust brightness when required. The battery life of the phone is quite decent as well with it featuring a 3020mAh battery which gives you an average of 17 hours of continuous video playback, or up to 21 hours of 4G calling. 

Overall, the Huawei Y5p is one of the best entry level devices on the market, powered by MediaTek's octa-core processort that includes eight Cortex-A53 cores which poweres Huawei's AI tech on the device, this all comes together to give the user a smooth and fast performing smartphone at a fraction of the price. You can purchase the Huawei Y5p for the RRP of just R1,899 from the Huawei online store of any of their partners. 

Bucket Tech: Huawei P40 Series in SA

After a delay yesterday, Huawei South Africa launched the rest of the P40 range in the country today, via a live online stream. As always celebrity partnerships were announced with the brand, bringing in the likes of Minni Dlamini, DJ Tira, Nay Maps, Anga Makubalo and Nasty C. Now there's not much about the device we didn't already know about since the global launch, it was just how the devices ecosystem will affect local uses, and obviously which devices from the range we would be getting. Well lets get the latter out of the way first, SA market will get the P40 and P40 Pro, no P40 Pro +, no mention if it would be considered in the future. As we all know Huaweis's devices are no longer supported by Google, so the ecosystem will be entirely different on the P40, with the Huawei App Gallery being your app store. Huawei have invested a lot in this over the past few years, getting developers to create more apps for the gallery, making it the third largest app ecosystem in the world. You will find most of your favourite apps on there, like Facebook, TikTok, etc and Huawei are throwing in freebies such as online shopping vouchers and other gifts that you just have to keep your eyes peeled for. 

Huawei's camera's have been their trademark feature for the P series from the P9 with its dual lens Leica camera. Huawei works with photographers to develop their cameras, so much so that the phone often becomes a camera with a phone. The trick to Huawei's camera is not the size of the lens but rather their sensor that they use. It allows more natural light in all your pictures, perfect for low light pictures. Then again with the AI capabilities of Huawei P40, it automatically enhances the pictures it captures but the AI doesn't stop there, it even helps you with editing unwanted objects or people in your shots. The video capabilities has been enhanced, especially the audio recording which was a major issue in the past, Huawei now has Audio zoom where you can select a subject and the audio recording will be enhanced for that particular subject. 

Huawei SA CTO Akhram Mohammed was pretty honest about the hurdles that the company faced after facing US restrictions but made note of the advancements Huawei has made to overcome these, there's still a long way to go but with Huawei using other forms of their research to help out in the medical, environmental and now local business fields. Pricing on the P40 and P40 Pro has been released, while its not cheap, Huawei is giving customers the chance to get a free P40 Lite with your purchase of either the P40 or P40 Pro. P40 is currently going for R16,999 with the Pro being R20,999. 

Bucket Tech: Honor 8X - First Impressions

Last night saw the launch of Honor in South Africa, the Chinese sub-brand of global giants Huawei brings with it a more affordable smart phone range which has already had tremendous success in Asia, Russia, Middle East and certain parts of Europe. The launch last night was for one of their flagship devices, the Honor 8X, form their X series, which they dub their "affordable flagship range"...didn't know there was such a thing but here we are. If I had to guess an equivalent range, I'd say its a budget version of the Huawei P Series. 

Telling us more about Honor was President of Honor MEA region, Chris Sun. With the success achieved elsewhere, it was a no brainer to launch Honor which offers unrivaled products at unbeatable prices. He also claims that Honor set "tech trends" with their devices improving the way low cost smart phones are made, offering their customers more for less. He has already set a target for his South African team, to achieve a top 3 market share by 2020 nationally. A major feat but it can be done. 

Next up Richard Liu, the CEO of Honor South Africa was up to tell us more about the device being launched, the Honor 8X. It's the first device in its category to offer a 91% screen to body ratio with full view display. Total screen size is 6.5", has 4GB of RAM and 64GB storage space. The Honor 8X has the Kirin 710 processor with GPU turbo improving response time for applications and gaming. The Honor 8X has AI cameras for both the front and back, with the main rear camera being 20MP dual lens and the fron, 16MP. The AI camera helps improve the quality of image captured by assessing the the background, light and focus. One of the main draw points is it's low light photography, when compared to the iPhone X, the camera on the Honor 8X shows more detail, light and better quality. The screen on the Honor 8X is also gentle on your eyes with it being the first mobile phone to receive certification from TUV Rheinland, assuring users that the screen emits low light that doesn't put strain on your retina. 

Now with all these great features and technology in the Honor 8X, you could be thinking the device is close to the 10 grand mark, but you would be wrong, Honor 8X is priced at R5499! Available from Monday the 26th of November across the country, exclusively to Foschini outlets and available in three colours, blue, black and red. This is just the first phase with plans for sales to be expanded through other mediums and outlets. Next year Honor plan to bring in more devices, starting with their flagship device in January.