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Buying guides, explainers and tech news — alongside our video reviews.
eSIM Is Quietly Taking Over Your Phone. Here's How the Tiny Chip Actually Works.
Apple's iPhone Air shipped without a SIM tray at all, and global eSIM adoption is climbing fast on new phones even if the installed base is still mostly physical cards. Here's how the embedded chip and its remote-provisioning servers actually work, and why Dubai's airport transit eSIM is a good example of the technology done right.
Inside UAE-PRIME: How Abu Dhabi Became a Testing Ground for Elon Musk's Brain Chip
Neuralink's first clinical trial outside North America is running quietly in Abu Dhabi, in partnership with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi and the Department of Health. Here's what the UAE-PRIME study actually involves, how the N1 implant works, and why the UAE became the pick.
Houthi Attacks Broke the Internet's Backbone. The UAE Is Racing to Build a New One
A September 2025 anchor strike near Jeddah severed two major Red Sea cables and slowed internet across the Middle East, exposing how fragile the Europe-Asia data route really is. Now e&, du and international partners are racing to land new submarine cables in the UAE, turning the country into the Gulf's main alternative route and data hub.
How a 1994 Toyota Factory Fix Became Dubai's Favorite Way to Pay
The QR code wasn't built for phones or payments — it was built to solve a barcode problem on a Toyota parts line in 1994. Here's how an open patent and a pandemic turned it into the tech now running Dubai's taxi and parking payments, and why UAE authorities are now warning about the scams riding on its back.
Don't Be Fooled: Inside the UAE's Growing Deepfake Fraud Problem
A 2020 case where fraudsters used a cloned voice to trick a UAE bank manager into wiring $35 million put deepfake fraud on the map. Six years on, UAE authorities are running public awareness campaigns against it, and businesses are still catching up.
The Cambridge Spinoff That Ended Up Inside Every Smartphone on Earth: Arm's Unlikely Story
Arm doesn't make a single chip, yet its designs power nearly every smartphone on the planet. Here's how a 12-person spinoff backed by a dying British computer maker and an unlikely Apple investment became the invisible architecture behind modern computing, survived a SoftBank-to-Nvidia deal collapse, and returned to the public markets in 2023's biggest tech IPO.
No Tuition, No Lectures Outside AI: Inside the World's First University That Only Teaches Artificial Intelligence
Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) calls itself the world's first graduate-level university dedicated entirely to AI. Six years in, it's fully scholarship-funded, harder to get into than many Western graduate programs, and has just enrolled its first undergraduates.
The Free Chip Blueprint Nobody Can Own: Inside RISC-V's Quiet Takeover
RISC-V is a free, open blueprint for processor design that started as a 2010 Berkeley research project and now ships inside storage controllers, Nvidia GPUs and Qualcomm chips. Here's how an unowned instruction set became a geopolitical flashpoint, and why it still hasn't dethroned Arm or x86.
Inside the Fold: Why the Hinge Is the Hardest Problem in Mobile Engineering
Seven years after the Galaxy Fold's screens famously broke in reviewers' hands, foldable phones are a real category — especially in the UAE, where limited editions sell out in minutes. Here's why the hinge, not the screen, is still the hardest part to get right.
How UAE Pass Became the Login for an Entire Country
UAE Pass launched at GITEX in 2018 as a single digital identity for government services, and has since grown to over 11 million users across 340+ entities. Here's how it became the default login for an entire country — and what's really behind its newly announced blockchain upgrade.
The Viking King Who Named Your Headphones: The Strange Origin Story of Bluetooth
Every pair of wireless earbuds and every smart speaker carries the name of a 10th-century Danish king with a famously bad tooth. Here's how a Swedish engineering project became one of the most unlikely branding decisions in tech history.
The Cambridge Spin-Off That Ended Up Inside Every Phone on Earth: The Untold Story of Arm
Arm doesn't make a single chip, yet its designs sit inside nearly every smartphone sold worldwide, including the ones stacked on shelves across Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Here's how a 12-person spin-off from a struggling British PC maker became the architecture the entire mobile industry quietly depends on.
The Operating System You've Never Opened But Use All Day: How Linux Took Over the World
A 1991 hobby project from a Finnish student now runs the vast majority of smartphones, every Top500 supercomputer, and most of the cloud infrastructure behind the UAE's AI and smart-city ambitions. Here's how Linux quietly became the most widely used operating system on Earth.
The $400 Million Machine That Makes Every Advanced Chip on Earth: Inside ASML's Lithography Monopoly
ASML, a little-known Dutch company, is the sole maker of the EUV lithography machines required to produce every leading-edge chip on the planet. Here's how a 1984 Philips joint venture became a $500 billion chokepoint for the entire AI and smartphone industry.
How Souq.com Became Amazon.ae: The Inside Story of the Middle East's First Big Tech Exit
Before Amazon.ae, there was Souq.com — a Dubai-born marketplace that pivoted from online auctions to fixed-price retail and grew into the Gulf's first unicorn. Its 2017 sale to Amazon, fought over by Dubai's own Emaar Properties, set the template for how global platforms localize in the region.
Inside Dubai's Robotaxi Rollout: How the RTA Is Building One of the World's Most Ambitious Driverless Transport Networks
Dubai's RTA has moved past robotaxi pilots into real commercial-adjacent operation, partnering with Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai while building a dedicated 15km Autonomous Zone. Here's what's actually running on the roads today, and the hard 2030 target the government has set for itself.
Matter 1.5 Is Here: Why Cameras Finally Joining the Smart Home Standard Matters for Dubai
The Connectivity Standards Alliance's Matter 1.5 update finally brings security cameras into the universal smart home standard, closing the one gap that forced buyers to pick an ecosystem based on their doorbell. For the UAE's fast-growing, multi-ecosystem smart home market, that's a bigger deal than it sounds.
The BlackBerry Standoff: How a Pager Company From Waterloo Took On a Government — and Blinked First in Dubai
In 2010, the UAE threatened to switch off BlackBerry services over encryption it couldn't monitor — a standoff resolved days before the deadline with no public details. Here is the full arc of BlackBerry's rise, its Gulf showdown, and its quiet afterlife as car software.
Inside Stargate UAE: How Abu Dhabi Became the World's Newest AI Superpower
Abu Dhabi's G42 is building Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI data centre cluster backed by OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank, inside a planned 5-gigawatt UAE-US AI Campus. Here's the verified story of how it came together and where construction stands heading into 2026.
Dubai's Robotaxis Are Already on the Road. Here's What Happens Next
WeRide robotaxis are now bookable through Uber in parts of Dubai, with a human safety specialist still on board. Here's how the pilot actually works, who's involved, and what has to happen before the cars are truly driverless.
Inside G42: How an Abu Dhabi Startup Became the Gulf's AI Superpower
G42 went from a 2018 Abu Dhabi cloud startup to the centerpiece of a $1.5B Microsoft deal and the Gulf's Stargate AI campus. Here's how it happened, and why Abu Dhabi is betting on compute the way other cities bet on ports and airports.
From the Boardroom to the Ban Threat: The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
BlackBerry went from a Waterloo startup to a global obsession, nearly getting banned in the UAE in 2010 over encryption before smartphones from Apple and Google ended its reign. Here is the full story, and what the company actually does today.
Careem's Strange Second Act: How Uber Is Quietly Buying Back the UAE's Biggest Super App
In 2019 Uber paid $3.1 billion to buy its Dubai-born rival Careem. In 2023 it spun the super-app business off to UAE telecom group e&. In 2026 Uber started buying it back — and the fine print points straight to full ownership by the early 2030s.
Masdar City Was Supposed to Fail. The Company Behind It Became a Clean-Energy Giant Instead.
Masdar City was announced in 2006 as the world's first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city, and it never came close to hitting that target. But the state-backed company behind it, Masdar, has grown into one of the world's largest clean-energy developers, with a 66.5-gigawatt global project pipeline in 2025.