Bucket Tech: New AI tricks on the OPPO Reno12

If there's anything we've learned from AI, it is that with the right tools, you can streamline any task. This accessibility means anyone can leverage AI without needing subscriptions or additional fees. It's not just a tool for creative professionals. AI assists us with everyday tasks, making it an essential tool for anyone seeking efficiency and speed in their routines.

The OPPO Reno12 Pro is one of the first few in the market to put AI functionality in the palms of smartphone users. This flagship smartphone from OPPO is renowned for its advanced AI capabilities, high-quality camera, and sleek design. 

Here are five ways its AI Features can easily enhance the phone’s functionality.

AI Eraser

One of the main standout features of the OPPO Reno12 Pro is the AI Eraser, which helps users transform their photos with ease. It can effortlessly transform a flawed photo into perfection in just a second. No need to rely on social media edit experts to remove unwanted elements from your pictures, with AI eraser, users can erase any unwanted objects from the frame. This creates a sleek image with no disturbance, blurring or strangers.

With AI Eraser, users can quickly rectify any imperfections by simply tapping on the edit icon in the gallery, selecting the AI Eraser tool, and highlighting the item. It seamlessly erases anything from the photo, preserving the natural beauty of the scene. A peaceful sunset scene can be enhanced by erasing strangers walking across the frame, ensuring photos always reflect the vision intended.

Ultra Night Mode Photography

Ultra Night Mode on the Reno12 Pro is a game-changer enabling users to capture stunning photos even in challenging low-light conditions. Using OPPO’s GenAI to analyse the physical surrounding environments, Ultra Night Mode is able to automatically adjust the lighting of the images to perfectly preserve memories taken at a night-time market or low-lit concert. 

AI Beautification

The AI Beautification feature on the Reno12 Pro takes the “I woke up like this” effect to a new level without extensively modifying appearance.. It subtly enhances facial features to ensure the best look. Easily take video calls while working from home, as it touches up uneven skin tone or refreshes tired eyes, effortlessly boosting confidence in any situation. The developers understand that you may not always want to rely on this feature. Still, when you want to use it, you can just enable and customise AI Beautification by simply opening the camera app, switching to the front camera, selecting AI Beautification mode, and adjusting the settings to your preference. Additionally, it can retouch your appearance in video calls on both Whatsapp and MS Teams without activating this feature. 

AI Scene Enhancement

AI Scene Enhancement is another powerful feature of the Reno12 Pro. It elevates Instagram image aesthetics to professional quality. For different scenes, such as landscapes or food, the AI enhances the colours and sharpness, making nature photos more vibrant and food photos more appetising, allowing users to capture the intricate textures of a gourmet meal with friends. With AI Scene Enhancement, the camera automatically adjusts to highlight the food's texture and colour, making photos look professional and Instagram-ready.

AI-Powered Battery Management

Battery life is critical, especially in our fast-paced world.  Whether you are in meetings, watching TikToks, or staying connected with family you should not have to worry about your dying phone. The Reno12 Pro’s AI-powered battery management optimises power usage by adjusting screen brightness, timeout settings and closing unused background apps, signifying extending battery life. 

This intelligent system ensures users stay connected and productive throughout the day. By adapting to usage patterns, it conserves energy seamlessly, highlighting the importance of advanced battery management. 

The OPPO Reno12 Pro's AI features to enhance the daily smartphone experience, ensuring users get the most from the device with convenience and reliability

Bucket Tech: HUAWEI nova Y61 Camera Features

The HUAWEI nova Y series has impressed many with its design philosophy, strong performance and smooth user experience. As a series designed with the younger generation in mind, the HUAWEI nova Y series has evolved according to the needs of younger users. The newest member of the series, the HUAWEI nova Y61, inherits its design DNA and incorporates a 50MP AI Triple Camera that produces picture-perfect photos.

Here are a list of impressive camera features you can explore:

The Rear 50MP AI Triple Camera for crisp, sharp images:

The HUAWEI nova Y61 has the perfect camera for aspiring professional photographers that don't have expensive equipment. The HUAWEI nova Y61 comes with a 50MP AI Triple Camera, the three rear lenses which are led by the 50MP Main Camera, allowing you to take high-res photographs with crystal clear details and ideal brightness. This is advantageous to those who want to capture vivid sceneries such as natural wonders, city skylines and more.

The second rear lens is the 2MP Depth Camera. It works in tandem with the 50MP Main Camera to produce well-lit aperture photographs that highlight the subject and their features in full clarity, enriching the layers of the image capture and creating a bokeh background that will not contrast too harshly against the main subject of the shot. 

For those who enjoy exploring and capturing nature’s wonders, they will love the 4cm Macro Camera in the HUAWEI nova Y61 smartphone as it will gives a microscopic view of nature.

From the veins of a leaf to the velvety textures of a flower petal, the Macro Camera on the HUAWEI nova Y61 is able to zoom up close to the subject, 4cm from the lens, to capture more details. 

The Super Night Shot:  perfect for tripod-free dusk photography:

The HUAWEI nova Y61 supports Super Night Shot, which allows you to capture gorgeous nightscapes without a tripod. The Super Night Shot feature adopts a multi-frame noise reduction algorithm, which can better suppress highlights. On top of that, the Super Night Shot can capture up to 6s shutter, which allows for longer exposure. 

AI Snapshots: achieving the art of the freeze frame:

Whether you are shooting pets in motion, sports or children running, you can freeze that moment in time and capture a precious memory without hesitation. 

The HUAWEI nova Y61 also has an AI-powered motion capture function, which intelligently detects motion through HUAWEI’s scene detection algorithm. The camera’s fool-proof point-and-shoot shutter adaptively adjusts the shutter speed and automatically freezes the moment of movement, saving you the hassle of learning new techniques for such shots. 

Get experimental with more photography modes:

The Large Aperture Bokeh lenses, consisting of the 50MP Main Camera and the exclusive 2MP Depth Camera work together to perfect the bokeh effect, blurring the background and highlighting the subject effectively without losing focus. This helps create wonderful portrait images fit for professional use, product try-on shoots and even for your school art portfolio. 

In addition, the rear camera comes with a Slow-Motion feature, which can be utilised creatively, especially for content creators who want to shoot cooking videos or precious moments in a sport event or concert. This would be ideal for those who want to indulge in the details of a single moment to better seize a memory in time and observe the changing micro-expressions and little micro-movements of a subject such as a pet, toddler or a dancer. 

The camera is also built with Master AI, which intelligently identifies specific objects and scenes, optimising the colour and brightness to achieve better scene-based photographs in different scenes. The HUAWEI nova Y61 is able to detect up to 17 different scenes including portrait, food, sunrise and sunset, fireworks, group photographs, waterfall, flowers, leaves, snow, stage, dogs and cats, autumn leaves, text and more. This will benefit lifestyle content creators who want to take photographs of wide varieties of scenarios. Whatever you’re shooting, your camera will adjust to your lifestyle and interests rather than the other way round.by getting rid of tedious adjustment processes and depending on the agile intelligence of the AI software built into your camera. Your camera is now ready for all the surprises that life can gives and all you need to do is point-and-shoot right away.

 Avoid delays and lag time with continuous front/rear recording 

In addition, the HUAWEI nova Y61 also supports continuous recording between the front and rear cameras. During the video recording process, the front and rear shots can be switched multiple times with a simple click, preventing inconvenient delays when shooting. This is especially useful if you are for example, shooting a vlog in a busy scenario with many family’s members and friends. With the continuous front/rear recording function, you no longer need to get anxious over missing footages or having to take too long to toggle between the front and rear cameras. 

Want to take crisp quality photographs this coming festive season? Take advantage of the new HUAWEI nova Y61. For only R3 299, you can purchase the HUAWEI nova Y61 smartphone from the HUAWEI online store and at selected retailers.  

Bucket Seat: BMW M4 Competition Convertible

This week saw BMW unveil the topless version of their most controversial model yet, the BMW M4 Competition. With the M3 and M4 already being acclimatized to the market, there still are some who still get uncomfortable looking at the large grille. Yes it is in your face and rather different from the brand but come now guys, its time to build a bridge, for me and many others, it looks great and the performance speaks for itself so lets forget about your opinion on the cosmetic aspects. Needless to say there was always going to be a performance model of the M4 and thank the heavens because BMW have opted to re-introduce the soft top. I mean, no offence to the hard top on the previous model but if you've ever driven the 4 Series with the folding hard top, you would know how much extra weight is added to the rear when folded as well as the car just not feeling hundred percent balanced. The only good thing I could speak about the folding hard top was that it looked cool while being opened or closed, almost like a transformer but that's about it for me. 

Anyway, lets not dwell on the past and look to the future with the all-new M4 convertible and my isn't she a beauty. BMW say that this is a new generation of top-class high performance sports car for the premium midsize segment. At the heart, the new M4 convertible retains the M TwinPower Turbo 3.0L inline 6-cylinder beast that powers its siblings the M3 and M4 Coupe, delivering 375kW and 600Nm of torque which propels the can from 0-100km/h in just 3.7 seconds! Doing that with the roof down must be another level of thrilling and probably will give new meaning to the term "feeling the wind in your hair". The engine is a high-revving one so you will be able to hear the sweet symphony of the exhaust even better with the convertible. 

Just like its hard top sibling, the M4 convertible will be offered in a host of colours and options for the end user to choose from, which includes all the cool stuff like multi-spoke rims, carbon kit, carbon seats not to mention some great textures and trims for that interior. Standard spec includes three-zone automatic climate control, ambient lighting, hi-fi speak system, plus BMW Live cockpit professional featuring fully digital display grouping, cloud based navigation system on BMW Maps and BMW Intelligent Personal Assistant. BMW promises an emotionally engaging drive with this new M4 convertible and I'm pretty sure it will deliver. The BMW M4 Competition Convertible M xDrive will be available in South Africa from the fourth quarter of 2021. Pricing yet to be announced. 

 

Bucket Seat: Renault Duster - Prestige EDC 4x2

There's always a sense of excitement when you get your first press car of the year, the thrill of getting behind something new that is hitting the road, experiencing what it has to offer and at the end of it all, summarizing my experience for you to read. There is no choice of what we can get but more of what is available and this year, first up with Renault's new Duster. I recall seeing the Duster for the first time at it's local debut, at the then, Johannesburg International Motorshow back in 2008. It was something different from the French manufacturer and had been causing quite a stir world over. A good friend of mine and fellow motoring journalist who was working at the show spoke so enthusiastically about the Duster that it was hard to ignore it. Truth be told, the first Renault Duster didn't look spectacular, it's boxy, there's a lot of plastic elements to it but the thing that made it so attractive was its capabilities and its price tag. The Renault Duster was one of the cheapest 4 x 4's around, in a compact SUV format and you can see the appeal it had going for it, fast forward to this new model, not much has changed, its still relatively cheap and has everything other, more expensive SUV's have to offer. 

DESIGN

White the overall design of the Duster hasn't changed much, it has evolved nicely from the box like shape to well rounded edges and more curves than before. It was never a bad looking car but with some of the latest input of the Renault Design language has done it wonders. The badge now big and bold, prominently mounted up front at the midpoint of the grille which has chrome accents and fuses well into the headlamps. The front headlights form to the new Renault design language with the day time running light LED having that signature C shape, it looks pretty cool. While the overall design doesn't look like it has changed much but if you take a closer look, you will notice it has changed a lot. Renault have added a lot more bulk to the new Duster, given it subtle characteristics to make it look robust and off-road worthy. Like the plastic console which the number plate sits on looks like a bull bar finished in brushed aluminium, it has the same feature on the back. The side just behind the front wheel arch has blacked out vent with the indicator below. The roof racks have the Duster signage visible, all these small elements added character to an already good looking vehicle. The colour I had was Dune Beige which gave the car a classy look, and suited the five spoke bi-colour rims. 

PERFORMANCE

Renault's 1.5dCI engine is nothing short of amazing, as it couples performance with economy and with my time with gave me endless pleasure while on my daily commute. The engine delivers 80kW and 260Nm of torque, I know that doesn't sound like much, especially for an off road vehicle but with Renault's EDC dual-clutch gearbox, which assists the engine when changing gears ensuring that speed is not lost during the gear transitions as well as no jerking or loss in acceleration. Upshiting is fast and smooth, and as mentioned before, the fuel economy is quite substantial compared to others in this segment. Driving wise, while the cabin is made up of mostly plastic, there is no weird noises or rattles, and the car gives a very smooth ride. It feels well balanced and with the various driving aides available on the Prestige model, its almost effortless to drive in tight spots and park virtually anywhere. 

COMFORT

The cabin is extremely spacious for both the front and back occupants, the leather seats feel good and normally with cars like this, I feel that they compromise on seat size to accommodate more space but none such issue with the new Duster. The key of the Duster is the controversial card like one, which I must admit is a bit built but the slim factor helps, the proximity senor on it is second to none though, giving the term "comfort access" a new meaning, its almost freaky how good this thing works for both locking and unlocking. The Duster comes with single zone climate control which does a pretty decent job cooling the entire cabin without a sweat, and compromising the engine. The storage capacity on the Duster is pretty good too, with the entire rear seat being able to fold for extra loading space giving you a 1/3 and 2/3 split.

        

TECHNOLOGY

The Prestige model is loaded with toys for the fundies and I was quite taken a back at the amount of features it came with standard which are not even standard on other luxury cars which cost twice the price of this! While the Duster may be geared for adventure enthusiasts, it has a heck load of things to help you with city driving, from blind spot warning with lights on either side mirrors to make you aware of cars on the lane next to you. It has ABS with EDC making sure braking power is distributed to all four wheels equally. Rear PDC's to make parking a breeze and if that wasn't enough it also has multi-view camera, which is four cameras around the car. One in the front, two either side and the reverse camera which all work in union when wanting a birds eye view of the car. The Duster also comes with a speed limiter and cruise control which I found odd that the controls for these were located next to the hand brake. Speaking of hand brake, there is no need to use it when on a steep incline as the Duster has hill assist. The Media Nav Evolution touch screen infotainment cluster, which is easy to use and has big tiles for effortless navigation. 

VERDICT

While the Duster is geared for adventure, truth be told its even more better for city driving which essentially is the place its going to spend most of its time with the odd weekend break away. It still maintains that charm which came with the first Duster and with its great looks, and very attractive price it will maintain its position in the market as the go-to cheaper alternative off-road option. With all these extras that are available for the Duster it will only make it more appealing to the buyer. For me, it wasn't the type of car I would go for but after driving around in one for a week, my perception has changed. With the increased ride height and spacious opening, its really a great way to drive and get in and out off. I won't be surprised to see this one do as well, if not better than the previous generation.

SPECIFICATIONS

Engine	1.5dCi
Gear Box	6 Speed Automatic
Power	80kW
Torque	250Nm
0-100	11.9 seconds
Economy	4.8L/100km
Price	R 334 900

Bucket Seat: Nissan Navara

When it comes to the double cab bakkie, I'm still skeptical about it being used as a daily drive. I believe all vehicles have their purpose and a bakkie shouldn't be a family car unless the said family is quite into outdoor activities and will be making use of the bin quite often. With this in mind, my next vehicle that came in for testing was the Nissan Navara. Now while this car has been getting attention in the motoring world a lot over the past few months, it was actually due to it sharing its underpinnings with the Mercedes-Benz X-Class. What many fail to grasp is that these two bakkies are completely different apart from a few minor things but soon as you hear that it's built on a similar platform, all logic goes out the window for any argument but even so, if the X-Class was almost similar to the Navara, why would that be a bad thing? Nissan have been building bakkies for decades now and their Hardbody's (apart from the latest NCAP safety ratings) have achieved legendary status in the market, so if you're going to want to build a bakkie, Nissan are the right people to talk to. So given this time with the Navara, I wanted to see what was "so bad" about it. 

DESIGN

With the double cab being very popular in the market, design is one of the main aspects that sway the buyer. The Navara certainly looks the part and has matured a lot since its previous generation. There's nice lines and flares to the body which add to that aggressive nature, bits of chrome to give it that luxury feel and its raised appropriately to give it a good stance. The headlights and front grille draw your attention first, with the hood slopped in at an angle, which is the first I've see in a bakkie design, this improves visibility from the driver seat of the front end. The side profile is pretty attractive too, with the rear passenger window having a more pronounced chamfer at the end, the roof racks and side step add to this as well as the chrome finished door handles. Over to the back, I love what they've done with the angled lip to the bin, gives an element of sportiness to the van, if I have to be over critical, I'd say the rear lights could have been a bit better and maybe throw in some LED's there but again, that's me being over critical. The interior of the van is quite nicely laid out as well. with much of the outside design flowing in the inside. The materials are of good quality and generally a nice place to be in. 

PERFORMANCE

What every bakkie ultimately boils down to, is performance, they're meant to be work horses so pointless having the looks but not the performance to back. The Navar comes fitting with a twin-turbo diesel motor which doesn't take much to get it going, as I soon discovered by taking it on the open road. Even with it's massive size and weight, the 2.3L engine delivers 450Nm of torque, combined with the 7-speed automatic gear box with timeous changes make getting up to speed effortless. Nissan claim their new improved turbo diesel generates more power and torque than their old engine and also has a 27% fuel saving, making it super efficient. I did a  lot of mixed driving with the Navara and I can vouch for it, getting close to 700km in the week with it and still have a decent range of over 100km when handed back. While it's performance on tar was impressive, I took the Navara out on some dirt road driving and it really was at home there as well. The large tyres gripping the loose gravel as I navigated some of the sugar can trails up Durban's North coast, kicking up a trail of dust as I meandered my way through to God knows where, I was having way too much fun to realise where I was going. 

COMFORT

A big gripe of mine is the comfort on these double cab bakkies, with many choosing it to use as a family car, I feel the rear passengers get the raw deal. Having sat in the back of a Hardbody, it isn't the most spacious place in the world and very cramped for someone like me, however, not the case with the Navara. There is ample room at the back, when I say ample I don't mean like S-Class vibes but bigger than your average double cab and a long journey won't result in your legs getting pins and needles. Over in the front, the dash is laid out quite well and doesn't sit too low, which allows for decent leg room for both the drive and the front passenger. The cabin's temperature is maintained by a aicron, unfortunately not climate control though. Ride quality on the Navara is superb, with it using a coil rear suspension which you would fine on larger SUV's. The heavy-duty 5-link coil rear suspension when compared to the traditional rear leaf suspension absorbs more of the bumps. 

VERDICT

Overall, the Navara as a double cab bakkie is pretty impressive and while it isn't on the NAMSA top 2 selling list it is worth the price tag. There are a few things that could be improved on, especially on the interior but with upcoming models in Nissan already adding these items to their portfolio, it would be  long till it's adapted to the Navara. I still don't see this as a family vehicle though, it is one of the more luxury looking bakkies out there but it's just not practical in my honest opinion but as I said in my introduction, if you're the type of family that is into outdoor activities and make use of the features in one, then by all means the Navara is worth the look. The fuel economy and engine performance seriously is impressive for a vehicle of this size and you can see why Mercedes-Benz chose this particular van to share it's underpinnings with. 

SPECIFICATIONS

Engine	2.3L Twin-Turbo Diesel
Gear Box	7 Speed Automatic
Power	140kW
Torque	450Nm
Emissions Level	Euro 5
Economy	6.5 L/100km
Price	R 484,900