In this week's episode of the Tech & Tonic podcast, we're sitting down with Hasnul Hadi Samsudin, Vice President of Digital Creative Content Division at the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). We talk about the Sony Playstation 5 and the growing Gaming and Creative industry in Malaysia.  Hasnul shares with us his insights into the industry and shares how much the industry has grown over the years as well as some of the plans his team has for Malaysia's LEVEL UP Gaming Conference which is still slated to happen this year! 

In this week's episode of Tech & Tonic, we delve deeper into the AMD Ryzen 4000 series of Mobile processors. These are not for mobile smartphones though, they are made for notebook PCs. This is also the very first 7nm processor to fit into notebook PCs. There are plenty of numbers out there to say that this is one powerful CPU. What does the number mean though? We try to delve deeper into what the numbers could mean in experience. We also heard that Lenovo is definitely launching their Lenovo Legion gaming smartphone sometime this year. We try to guess what it might come with.

In this episode of Tech & Tonic Podcast, we discussed new developments on AMD's side. They say that the new platform for 4000 series Ryzen CPU for desktops are not going to support the AM4 socket and chipsets anymore. That angered a lot of fans though, and they have turned around from there. There are some new things from Xiaomi as well. They showcased their brand-new MIUI 12 UI. Since there are no new Android versions just yet, MIUI 12 is technically just a visual update. There is a few new things on the UI itself though, including an app drawer. At the same time HONOR launched their new HONOR Life ecosystem of home appliances and electronics. They also launched their new line of MagicBook notebook line up and they look tantalizing.

We come back after skipping a week of no podcast. We were a little under the weather last week and was a little bit swamped, so we do apologise. Still, it has been about two months since the state sanctioned quarantine took over. We nearly lost count of the days. Still, we caught up with one of Malaysia's first ever eSports caster, Flava! He gave a little bit of insights into how the eSports scenes have evolved for him through the years and how he is coping with the current stay-at-home situation. Still, one of the biggest things happened last week from Epic Games. They released their new Unreal Engine 5 and demo-ed it on the Sony PlayStation 5. They also did one of the biggest giveaways last week in the GTA 5: Premium Edition. Of course, we have to talk about those! More in this week's Tech & Tonic!

We were able to sit down with Mr. Alex Tan, the Director of Sales in ASEAN for HID Global, to talk about security and biometrics. With the increasing ubiquity of fingerprint sensors, face unlock and even voice recognition, we were interested in finding out if these technologies are as secure as they claim to be. Mr Alex shared some of HID's new technologies and also some of the industry's trends when it came to biometric security, the new tech that would be coming out as well as some of the things we can do to ensure that we are secure when using biometrics and also when it comes to personal data protection.

We delayed the Tech & Tonic Podcast recording today to watch a new smartphone being launched by OPPO. The new OPPO A92 breaths fresh life into the mid-range smartphone market. That brings us to a very interesting topic of mid-range smartphones though. Should you now buy these smartphones instead of the more expensive flagships? DJI also launched a new product, the DJI Mavic Air 2, a successor to the very interesting DJI Mavic Air of last year. It is slightly bigger with plenty of upgrades. It is quite a bit more expensive though. Still, it is the best time to fly a drone right now, so should you spend on one? All this and more in Tech & Tonic Podcast!

Music

Bossa Antigua by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3454-bossa-antigua

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This episode we're talking to prolific Tech YouTuber, Joshua Vergara, and returning guest: Tech Fashionista, Isa Rodriguez. We spoke about what we thought about Motorola's first flagship in three years, the Motorola Edge+ and whether the company is still relevant in a market which is saturated with companies like OPPO, Samsung, Apple, HUAWEI, vivo and more. Talking about the new flagship also brought us to a very important topic: Affordability and Flagships. The big question for us: will the new iPhone SE reshape what the world thinks? Being tech content creators, we also talked about how we're dealing with working from home and even some of our must have tech during the lockdown.

In another week of Tech & Tonic and state sanctioned quarantine, we find ourselves without a guest again. Still, we have plenty of things that we were excited about. One of them is the new Apple iPhone SE. That is Apple's new, less premium, more affordable smartphone that still packs a lot of power with their own A13 Bionic Processor for MYR 2,999. Last week also we saw the new OnePlus 8 flagship that packs nearly the same things that an OPPO FInd X2 Pro packs int their hardware. The only difference? a 30W wireless charger and design language. We finally unboxed the HUAWEI MatePad Pro too, which we actually like quite a lot - that is unexpected. Still, it does not come with Google's essential apps and framework which hurts it a little bit. 

Music:

Cool Vibes by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3553-cool-vibes

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

On this week's Tech & Tonic show, we are going a little basic. It is the first time in our show's channel that we did not invite any guest to sit down with us and discuss about what happened last week. It is the first time as well that we did not have prepared a script on the order of the show. So we talked about everything under the sun last week. We touched on Sony's DualSense controller and what that means for PS5. We teased the HUAWEI P40 Pro and the unboxing of the MatePad Pro too. There was news all week on Zoom as a platform being vulnerable to cyber attacks. So we touched on the tools that we used at home for video conference and recording. 

We sat down in our homes and have had a chat with Kevin Reed from Acronis. Kevin is the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) of Acronis with over 20 years of experience in the field. We thought we might catch up with him a little bit on the state of cyber security in the current climate. With many taking advantage of COVID-19 situation as well, we thought it might be a good idea to get some well needed advise on how to protect ourselves from losing data.