Hasta La Gadget!

Bell tried to shake up the Canadian media landscape last year by acquiring Astral Media, but it ran into a CRTC-sized roadblock — regulators didn’t want 25 TV stations moving to one provider. After some big concessions, however, Bell has received approval to buy Astral for $3.2 billion. The revised deal gives Bell control of 12 channels that include The Movie Network, HBO Canada’s owner. Bell is offloading some important TV content to move forward, though. Corus gets several recognizable channels that include the Cartoon Network and Teletoon, while big stations like Disney XD and MusiquePlus are on the auction block. Not that Bell will complain too loudly when the buyout closes on July 5th, mind you. The merger still gives it 35.8 percent of the English Canadian TV market and 22.6 percent of its French Canadian equivalent, or enough to immediately eclipse rivals like Rogers and Quebecor.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Via: Variety

Source: Astral Media

Convergence, the dictionary tells us, is the point where two things combine, so imagine Sceptre’s new hardware as the singles bar where speakers and Android first met. The SB301524W Sound Bar 2.1 marries dual front-facing speakers, a 35W subwoofer, 2.4GHz WiFi 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Ice Cream Sandwich to rejuvenate any old display into a Smart TV. Naturally, users will be able to access Google Play and download apps to the machine, but there’s no word on capacity or expandability — something you’ll have to ask in the store before you shell out $300 on the gear.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD, Google

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Source: Sceptre

Not all BlackBerry owners are ready for new phones just yet, but many of them still want to browse their Twitter feeds as efficiently as possible. A Twitter 4.2 update launching today should keep those users satisfied: the release brings image cards to BlackBerry OS 5 and up, letting those on older devices peek at photos in the timeline. The upgraded version also populates that timeline with more details about the tweets themselves, and it suggests people to follow when looking at profiles. If those additions are enough to fight off the urge for a hardware upgrade, the new Twitter app is available at the source link.

Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Mobile, Blackberry

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Via: Inside BlackBerry

Source: BlackBerry World

Okay, we’re day a late, but we’re not $50 dollars short since Richard avoided the World War Z ‘Mega Ticket.’ That much and only a small popcorn? No, thanks. Despite seeing the movie twice for regular price, however, Ben is still convinced that Richard’s the guy who hates every movie and loves every TV show. We’ll let you decide by tuning to this week’s episode of the Engadget Podcast below.

Hosts: Ben Drawbaugh (@bjdraw), Richard Lawler (@rjcc)

Producer: Joe Pollicino (@akaTRENT)

Hear the podcast

Filed under: Podcasts, HD

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Don’t get excited about buying the new robots created by Japanese company Dentsu in conjunction with Toyota and the University of Tokyo — they won’t be hitting stores anytime soon. However, do get excited that one of them, namely the white-helmeted droid Kirobo (shown above, left), will actually be launched into orbit as part of a Japan Space Agency mission to the ISS on August 4th. In fact, he and his backup Mirata were endowed with voice recognition, natural language processing, speed synthesis, realistic body language and facial recognition for that very reason. They’ll be participating in the “world’s first conversational experiment” between people and robots in space, while also mixing it up with kids on earth with educational activities. Hopefully, the astronauts won’t give Kirobo any HAL 9000-like control of the station, though the cute ‘bots seem malice-free, saying they “wanted to create a future where humans and robots live together and get along.” Check it out for yourself in the video after the break.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Alt

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Source: US News