Author: Kaluka wanjala

For close to two years, Telkom Kenya has been working with a company called Loon to help it take high speed internet to rural parts of the country. Loon uses balloons 20 kilometers above earth that act as cell towers. These balloons help mobile network operators expand coverage to underserved communities. The two have been working on this and have done all the tests and received all the approvals needed to start operating. With everything in place, Telkom has announced that internet through these balloons will be available as from this month. The company has revealed that it saw uplink…

Xiaomi has officially unveiled the Redmi Note 9 Pro, Redmi Note 9 and Mi Note 10 Lite smartphones in Kenya. The three devices were launched in Kenya last week and you can now get them in Mi Home stores in the country and online through Jumia. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro The Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro in Kenya is the successor to the Redmi Note 8 Pro that has been in the country for a while. The Redmi Note 9 Pro in Kenya will be available in two variants, one with 64GB of storage while the other one…

About a week ago, we told you that ShowMax had decided to axe the Live news streaming service from its platform. The streaming service said that reason for this was that they were given access to the channels as a temporary measure in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis in order to help everyone keep up-to-date on the latest developments. Since the lockdown is now easing and slowly things are getting back to some kind of new normal, they were going to be discontinue the news service. The company did not give any hints of any new services it…

Back in March as the effects of the current pandemic were being felt, Safaricom and the other industry players had talks with the central Bank of Kenya to waive the charges for all transactions below Ksh 1,000. This was to make sure those who were sending any amount below that through M-Pesa could do so for free and this was meant to ease the financial strain that they could experience because of the pandemic. The free cash transfer period was to go all the way to June (last month) and it did and since the pandemic is still with us,…

Microsoft is making some changes to OneDrive and the key one is the raising of the upload file size limit from the current one of 15GB to 100GB. This limit has been raised for Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint users. These changes were announced last week and are much appreciated by business users who may have seen the 15GB file limits as being too restrictive. This is the case with those businesses who deal with very large files and may not have found OneDrive to be easy to use. Besides the increase in file upload limits, it has also been revealed…

Microsoft has announced a new global skills initiative aimed at bringing more digital skills to 25 million people worldwide by the end of the year. The announcement comes in response to the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Expanded access to digital skills is an important step in accelerating economic recovery, especially for the people hardest hit by job losses. This initiative, detailed on the Official Microsoft Blog, includes immediate steps to help those looking to reskill and pursue an in-demand job and brings together every part of the company, combining existing and new resources from LinkedIn, GitHub…

OPPO has today launched yet another smartphone in Kenya. This new smartphone is the OPPO A52 that is currently available on Jumia for Ksh 24,999. At this price the phone competes directly with the recently launched Huawei Y8p and we will see who emerges victorious. Those who buy the OPPO A52 from Jumia will get the new OPPO W11 earphones for Ksh 3,000, down from Ksh 4,999. This offer is available during the Jumia anniversary sale that is ending on July 5th. OPPO Kenya Communication and Projects Manager Muthoni Wachira said the introduction of the new device, coming shortly after…

WhatsApp is introducing a number of features some of which have been available to those beta testing its apps. These features will roll out to users over the next few weeks so be on the lookout for them. The first one is the introduction of QR codes that users can use to quickly add new contacts. With this, you will not have to manually type the phone number as this is an easier and faster option. WhatsApp has been testing this feature for months and if you are using WhatsApp beta version, you may have seen it at some point.…

As the current pandemic forced most people to stay indoors, streaming services like ShowMax had to find new ways to get people to use their platforms. The company introduced a Live News streaming segment on its platform for those who want to keep up with the latest happenings around the world. This segment was introduced back in March and gave users access to some new channels including BBC World News, Al Jazeera, CNN International, Sky News, Euronews and Newszroom Africa. This was one of the many changes ShowMax implemented during this pandemic to take advantage of the people who flooded…

Tension between India and China is rising and the latest move comes from the Indian Government targeting a huge number of applications made by Chinese companies. In total, the Indian Government has banned a total of 59 applications including popular ones like TikTok. This is quite a headache for TikTok as India is its biggest market as per Google Play downloads according to data from Statista. In the country, the app has over 100 million users which is quite big and a number that is rising by the day. The Indian Government says the ban comes into effect as it…