I tested Simify’s travel eSIM across Asia: Is it worth the price?

Travel SIM cards have been growing in popularity for obvious reasons — people love going places and hate being without internet. But the question of what kind of trip makes these kinds of SIMs worth it also comes up a lot, so I used Simify for my whole family for a trip to Taiwan, and then for myself on business trips across Japan, China and Hong Kong.

The answer is that travel SIMs like Simify aren’t suited to every trip, but they come in clutch for very specific kinds of travel.

Using Simify in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan

What I loved about using Simify for my family holiday in Taiwan was how easy it was to set up. This was particularly great for my mother, because while she’s more tech savvy than many almost-80-year-olds, having me be able to order SIMs for her, my wife, and me in one go, and then text the links to them, which set up seamlessly in the app, was such a relief. The app’s instructions for the setup were clear, and both her iPhone 12 Pro Max and my iPhone 17 Pro Max were ready to go within minutes.

We got an Unlimited Asia eSIM because we wanted to be able to use it in Hong Kong if our layovers got extended or rerouted. I like to be prepared for any eventuality, and I don’t trust airlines to stick to a timetable (and I am so right for that).

Screenshot: Alice Clarke.

It wasn’t without a hitch, though, and while it’s certainly a lot less work than buying a prepaid SIM when you get to your destination, it lacks a lot of perks that are available to those willing to put in the effort.

For starters, not having a local phone number meant it was much harder to use Taipei’s bike rental scheme. This was another issue that came up in Japan, because I didn’t have access to any phone number, so I just couldn’t use the bikes there. There are workarounds, of course, but they’re a lot more labour-intensive and often not as good.

The second issue was that it was a lot more expensive than buying a local SIM, and also more expensive than some competitor products. Simify is cheaper than Holafly on some plans, but more expensive than some of the options on SimCorner, for example. On the Asia plan, at its most expensive, it’s $5.40 a day. It’s cheapest if you stay for 180 days, making it $2.19 a day.

My third issue was that Simify uses the old definition of “unlimited”. To me, unlimited data means that I can use an unlimited amount of data at the advertised 4G/5G speeds. To Simify, unlimited data is 1GB at full speed, and then unlimited data at a trickle so slow that Google Maps won’t load.

That said, it is very easy to message Simify in the app (over Wi-Fi, because the app also won’t load on the throttled speeds), and ask them to reset your data cap, and they’ll usually respond either instantly or the next day.

If your data allowance runs out, prepare for slow speeds. Screenshot: Alice Clarke.

Another issue is that for shorter trips (16 days or less), it’s actually more expensive than using Optus or Vodafone’s roaming options. With Optus, $5 a day gives me 5GB of data and unlimited calls and texts. With Simify, $5(ish) a day gives me 1GB at full speed and then not much else. But it does make a lot of sense on longer trips when you don’t need much data, because you can be connected for as little as $2.20 a day if you’re staying somewhere for more than 90 days.

While that doesn’t make sense if you’re just staying in the one country, because it would be cheaper and more effective to just get a local SIM, an around-the-world trip with many stops and a need for flexibility is the perfect use case for Simify.

The final issue is a bit nitpicky, but the app needs to chill with the notifications. If I am actively on a trip, using a Simify SIM card, I do not need daily (and sometimes more frequent) ads to buy a SIM card, regardless of what discounts are being offered. I needed to keep notifications on so I could know when customer support replied to my messages asking for more data, and it was just aggravating to have the privilege of push notifications be abused like that. It showed a lack of respect for the customer.

China

Those gripes aside, it was great using Simify in China, because all my roaming traffic was routed through various European countries by default, which meant I could browse the internet unimpeded.

On Wi-Fi, the Great Firewall of China blocked me from much of my social media and some other websites, but using Simify, I was able to (very slowly) browse like I was home without having to faff about with VPNs.

Simify Unlimited Asia eSIM verdict

While Simify isn’t the best option for every use case, I mostly found it very easy to use, and can absolutely see which situations it would be ideal for, as long as people are aware of the limitations.

If Simify upped the data cap for what is available at full speed, it would be a lot easier to recommend, given that 1GB is nothing in 2026. But aside from that, Simify is a great option for your next multi-country trip longer than 16 days.

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Moza’s flashy steering wheel is a Porsche fan’s dream

My latest sim racing obsession is the Moza Porsche Mission R Steering Wheel, an officially licensed replica based on the CAD data of the real-life Porsche Mission R electric supercar wheel. The 320mm wheel comes with a machined aluminium frame, making it strong and rigid, while the suede-like grips feel great in-hand.

With a modest 12 controls, this Moza wheel has that sleek, premium feel while sticking true to the real-life version. Around the back, you have aluminium alloy paddles for shifting gears and releasing the clutch with precision. The big hitter has to be the oversized 5.4-inch flexible OLED display made from tempered glass. This thing is a beauty.

Naturally, I spun the wheel playing Forza Horizon 6 and driving the Porsche Mission R to match. Some things are just meant to be. At a rather lofty $2,299, this wheel is for those with deep pockets, compared to some of Moza’s more affordable wheels. But it’s great for diehard Porsche fans.

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Cheaper Meta Glasses range includes Kylie Jenner-inspired design

Meta has been all-in on smart glasses for a while now, but the price has typically been a deterrent. To try to get more people on board with its AI vision, Meta has launched a new set of smart specs starting at $469, the brand’s cheapest wearables so far.

Known simply as the ‘Meta Glasses’, the latest range consists of three different designs: Adventurer, Fury, and Glasses by Kylie (of the Jenner variety). All three models are part of a new range with fashion brand EssilorLuxottica. Each one has a different look, with the Adventurer a more traditional rectangular shape, Fury slightly bigger and rounder, while the Kylie Jenner-inspired pair opt for a slimmer, oval-shaped look.

As for what makes these glasses ‘smart’, each pair has built-in speakers, microphones, and cameras. Consistent with Meta’s smart glasses before them, these specs (not to be confused with Snap’s US$2,195 SPECS) include various AI-based features, like live translation, with pedestrian navigation coming soon to models like these without a built-in display. There’s also a dedicated button for Meta AI, the brand’s smart assistant designed to respond to context-based queries.

Image: Meta.

According to Meta, the glasses include “built-in safeguards to respect the privacy of people around you”. An LED light turns on when the camera’s in use, while Meta’s website has various tips for responsible use. Whether people follow those guidelines or not is a whole different thing.

Meta also advertises “over eight hours of battery” for the new smart glasses. That should be enough for all-day use, provided you’re not using every feature at every waking moment.

Australians can get the new Meta Glasses now via Meta’s online store or optical retailers. In addition to the $469 starting price for the Adventurer and Fury designs, the Kylie design starts at a pricier $629 locally.

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Can Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra out ref the ref?

Ref got it wrong? Now you can whip out your phone and tell them so, in slow motion. (I’m sure they’ll love that.)

Samsung reckons it has the answer, and it may already in your pocket. A few clever features on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and to a lesser extent the rest of the Galaxy S family, are being positioned as the great sideline peacekeeper:

Space Zoom, the 100x zoom found on the S26 Ultra, lets you zoom in close enough to settle exactly whose foot did what to whom, and where the ball actually ended up. Perfect for refereeing from forty metres away with the confidence of someone who definitely didn’t see it properly the first time.

If it all happens too fast for the human eye, Instant Slow-mo uses AI to generate extra frames and slow the action right down, so you can relive that contested handball in glorious, undeniable detail.

Super Steady (motion stabilisation) and Horizontal Lock keep your footage level even while you’re sprinting down the sideline for a better angle. The footage stays smooth. Your dignity, less so.

Samsung’s even floated the idea that the S26 Ultra could double as a pocket VAR, or video assistant referee – timely given how much the real VAR is already being talked about at The World Cup!

To see it in action, check out Samsung’s video featuring Archie Thompson, former Socceroo from the golden era of 2006, and a team of very enthusiastic kids from Sutherland Sharks FC.

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This might be the clearest explanation of high tech prices yet

Every time someone from a tech company has discussed the increasing prices of hardware, they’ve followed a pretty similar playbook. Vague, general references to the global memory shortage, followed by a boilerplate reason as to why the only option is to pass costs onto consumers. It’s why Valve’s confirmation of the Steam Machine’s pricing was so interesting; rather than give an empty, corporate-speak-filled response, as many have done before, it went into refreshing detail about the company’s price strategy.

Take, for example, this excerpt from Valve’s announcement post:

Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices – primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives.

This last sentence is something that’s all too familiar to tech and gaming enthusiasts right now. Usually, early adopters would pay the most to be the first to have a new device. After a while, prices would come down, as components and manufacturing get cheaper. However, the opposite is currently happening.

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Here’s a quick look at some of the recent major price increases, past and upcoming:

• Valve lifted Steam Deck prices by up to $380
• Samsung bumped some of its phones and tablets up by $200
• An Nvidia RTX 5090 graphics card currently costs upwards of $6,000 (after launching at $4,039)
• A PS5 costs $250 more in Australia than it did in 2020
• Nintendo will increase the Switch 2 price by $70 in September
• Nothing cancelled this year’s budget phone due to memory prices
• Apple is widely tipped to charge more for the iPhone 18 range

Why are tech prices so high right now?

As a quick refresher, the major investments in generative AI technology, namely the data centres required to power the technology at scale, have resulted in huge demand for components. Memory and storage are crucial to data centre operations, causing companies to buy up not only existing stock, but also future allocations yet to be produced.

This leads to the next part of Valve’s explanation:

Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we’re sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we’ve secured them over the past 6 months.

Price wasn’t the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn’t source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we’ve been able to produce for launch.

It’s a remarkable level of transparency rarely seen from a tech (or tech-adjacent) company. Valve confirms the problem faced by every tech manufacturer right now: cost and availability.

Apple’s outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, recently claimed that “price increases are unavoidable”. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he described the squeeze on the tech supply chain as something he’d “never seen anything like” in his 40-plus-year career, labelling it a “hundred-year-flood” event.

While Cook didn’t elaborate as much as Valve’s statement (unattributed to any individual author), it was a rare show of candour from a Silicon Valley executive. Most of what gets said on public record only refers to broad concepts, likely in an attempt to avoid ceding any competitive advantages when negotiating hardware deals with suppliers. Even Cook’s statement, as enlightening as it was for contextualising the tech industry’s challenges, was scant on specifics.

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Conversely, Valve revealed just how much the memory shortage is playing havoc with device launches, in both timing and pricing. When you look at a new phone, PC, or games console on a retailer’s shelf, you likely wouldn’t consider how many months’ worth of components the company had to secure, and at what cost, to arrive at the price indicated on the sticker.

An important distinction to make here is that Valve is a private company. It’s not beholden to appeasing shareholders and investors. Valve’s top priority is keeping its paying customers on board, hence the transparency.

Regardless, no amount of transparency makes it easier to shell out thousands of dollars for a device that would’ve been cheaper just a short few years ago.

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Will Hoyts Apex be the next big thing in cinema technology?

The battle to get people to come back to the cinema has been a tough one. Hoyts’ latest not-so-secret weapon in this war is to offer a wider variety of screen and chair technologies. At the centre of this strategy is Hoyts Apex, a massive screen that uses LED technology instead of traditional cinema projectors.

Apex joins several other technologies Hoyts is pinning its hopes on, including D-Box, IMAX, and ScreenX. Hoyts Melbourne Central is one of the latest locations to get the big LED screen, with tickets costing $34 for adults and $28.50 for children.

At an early first look at the new cinema screen, Hoyts executives explained how it fits with the chain’s overall plans. With the cinema industry still rebuilding after COVID disruptions, in addition to the availability of streaming services, Hoyts still boasts a 30 per cent market share in the cinema space, and three million registered rewards members across Australia and New Zealand.

According to the Hoyts executives, 2026 has been a good year so far, claiming an increase of 31 per cent in the year to date. They didn’t specify whether that figure was revenue, ticket sales, or attendance, but were confident that people are getting back to cinemas. It’s hoped that major new technologies, like Hoyts Apex, will keep that trend going.

Hoyts Apex brings big and bright to the cinema

Apex is the most interesting new technology to come to Hoyts. It’s an absolutely massive LED screen. In Melbourne, it’s 21 metres wide, 10 metres tall, with the one in Perth maxing out to a massive 25m wide, both featuring a 2.31 aspect ratio.

The screen itself is made up of modular cabinets. Each cabinet holds 10 smaller modules, with each module made up of 5,148 LEDs, for an impressive total of 17 million LEDs across the whole screen. Each module can be taken out and repaired or replaced individually in Australia, reducing any possible downtime should a few pixels die. Melbourne Central also has 100 spare modules on hand, just in case.

A close-up view of the LEDs. Image: Alice Clarke.

The panels themselves are flat, but the screen itself has a gentle curve, less than a gaming monitor, but enough to further immerse the viewer in the film.

The benefits of Apex are quite significant: there’s basically no maintenance required (beyond occasionally tweezing out a broken LED to replace it), they last longer than a traditional cinema projector, it marks an end to people blocking the projector’s beam if they have to get up midway through the movie, and the screen is brighter, allowing for whiter whites.

Perth also has a Hoyts Apex cinema, located in Karrinyup. Image: Supplied.

With a 6,000-nit peak brightness, the screen supports HDR, while the audio setup supports Dolby Atmos. There’s no light bleed from the screen technology itself, though there can be some baked into the content (as I discovered in The Devil Wears Prada 2). However, reds do seem to be a bit washed out on it, from what I’ve seen.

Overall, it’s a pretty incredible screen technology, and the experience of watching a film on it is excellent.

Everything’s bigger on IMAX

Everyone by now is very familiar with the bigger, taller screens of IMAX, with more films having sequences natively filmed on IMAX cameras. One of the most notable is The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film shot entirely for IMAX.

This is paired with IMAX laser projectors and IMAX sound to make the experience more immersive. The demo at Melbourne Central certainly showed off how impressive the setup is, and I’m really looking forward to seeing The Odyssey on those screens.

D-Box gets your chair moving

The technology with the funniest name is D-Box. These motion recliners have been rolled out at more than 30 cinemas across the country so far, and they move and vibrate to match the action on the screen.

It’s not as intense as one of those 4D Cinema rides you get at theme parks, but if that’s what you were imagining, you’re on the right track. The chairs pitch, roll and vibrate in sync, which makes them a perfect match for action films.

Images: Alice Clarke.

Surprisingly, a friend of mine saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 in the D-Box and reported that it actually heightened the emotional intensity of the film. It also made her more aware of vehicles that passed by on screen (stay tuned for more thoughts on The Sapphic AV Club podcast).

For those who aren’t up for the full intensity of the D-Box, there are individual controls for each seat that can be adjusted throughout the film. It’s also a fully cushioned comfort recliner, so you can be comfortable while experiencing the action.

ScreenX stretches the limits

I must admit, I do not see the point of ScreenX in its current form. It’s a square room with a regular (albeit) cinema screen in front, and then screens on the walls to the left and right. The effect is very impressive and immersive. I can see it being a place where things filmed for Apple Vision Pro might be screened to the masses.

But the way it was shown to us was with a clip from Project Hail Mary, with the left and rightmost 10 per cent of the screen stretched into oblivion on the side walls. It had the potential to be cool, but instead it was just distracting.

Image: Alice Clarke.

If the footy finals can be filmed in a way that takes advantage of the side walls, or a concert perhaps, I can see it being amazing. But for the use case we were shown, it was pretty unpleasant. The seats were comfy, and the popcorn was delicious. But those stretched sides… hoo boy.

While all of these new cinema technologies are installed at Hoyts Melbourne Central, they can be found spread around the Hoyts network of cinemas, with more expected to be renovated soon.

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Valve locks in $1,609 starting price for Steam Machine in Australia

Valve has finally confirmed the price for its eagerly awaited Steam Machine, a gaming PC that runs SteamOS, designed to provide a more streamlined, console-like experience. Except that its $1,609 starting price in Australia is distinctly un-console-like.

With listings for the device now live online, the Steam Machine comes in a few different configurations. One is just the PC with 512GB of internal storage, which carries the aforementioned $1,609 price tag locally. If you want a Steam Controller, too, you can bundle it in at a total cost of $1,728, which is $30 cheaper than buying the gamepad outright.

Need more storage? The only other configuration for now is 2TB, costing Australians $2,109. Similarly, there’s also a Steam Controller-inclusive bundle, retailing for $2,228. 512GB won’t go too far with modern games, many of which exceed 100GB install sizes. However, courtesy of the global memory shortage, components like RAM and storage cost an absolute mint right now.

Valve even admitted to Eurogamer that the Steam Machine price is “significantly more” than what the company originally had in mind. Lawrence Yang, who worked on the Steam Machine’s user interface, also confirmed that Valve produced “less than we wanted to be able to make” of the PC, contributing to a lottery-style buying system at launch.

No guarantees of buying a Steam Machine

To even get a Steam Machine in the first place, prospective buyers need to sign up for a list for the model they want to buy. Fortunately, it’s not a first-come, first-served system, with sign-ups open until 3:00 AM on Friday, 26 June, Sydney time.

From there, Valve will determine who can buy one via a “one-time randomisation”. Aussies who make the cut will receive an email on 26 June, confirming a Steam Machine reservation. Anyone else will be added to a waitlist.

In an effort to weed out scalpers, Valve requires potential buyers to have made a purchase on their Steam account before 27 April. As confirmed on Valve’s FAQs, each region also has a separate sign-up list, including Australia.

As for the price, Valve is one of many to feel the pinch of global economics. When it increased the price of the Steam Deck last month, the company cited “the current state of component costs and other global logistical challenges across the industry as a whole.”

Today, Valve further clarified how it landed on the price of the Steam Machine, explaining that component shortages and increased costs had an impact.

“The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable,” Valve’s statement said.

While the company didn’t specify what price it originally planned for, it’s certainly far from being the only brand to have plans upended by the current state of hardware manufacturing.

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