Hasta La Gadget!

UK-centric news is plentiful today while America busies itself with feasts and football. One such announcement concerns the launch of Nokia’s first tablet, the Lumia 2520, which will go on sale December 4th exclusively at John Lewis and affiliate stores. Running Windows RT 8.1, the colorful 10.1-inch tablet will cost £400, while the optional keyboard accessory will retail for an additional £150 when it becomes available “in the coming weeks” (although we can’t say we were enamored with the typing experience in our review). Curiously, John Lewis’ monopoly means you’ll have to go to extra lengths to make use of the 2520’s LTE radio by procuring a 4G data-only SIM from EE or O2. Thus, you also can’t take advantage of any carrier subsidies. There’s no word on exactly when the exclusivity period will end, but if you just have to have one, you know exactly where to go.

Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft, Nokia

Comments

John Lewis

BT has landed quite a few major sports broadcasting deals as of late, including its buyout of ESPN’s British and Irish channels back in February. Today, it’s extending its athletic empire with an exclusive arrangement to air NBA games in Ireland and the UK. The agreement will see BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2 and ESPN broadcast as many as seven live games per week, with some of them streaming through BT Sport’s website and mobile apps. While there isn’t a huge market for basketball in the country, the pact will make life much easier for diehard UK fans and American ex-pats — they won’t have to buy online passes or otherwise bend over backwards to keep up with their favorite NBA teams.

[Image credit: Getty]

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Comments

Source: BT

Nothing tests a stiff upper lip like a next-gen console launch. Having already been spooked by inaccurate pricing on the PlayStation Network, some Brits are now discovering that the Xbox One‘s heavily promoted TV functions aren’t readily compatible with their set-top boxes. Whether on Freeview, Virgin or Sky, users’ efforts to route TV output through the Xbox One’s HDMI passthrough port are apparently resulting in “juddery” and unwatchable video — perhaps because the Xbox One defaults to 60 frames per second while most UK hardware sticks to the PAL standard of 50Hz. In turn, if they’re forced to give on using passthrough, they also have to miss out on the use of Kinect voice control to start watching TV, change the volume or “snap” TV side-by-side with an app.

Ironically, one UK service that has made a particular point of never supporting the Xbox One — namely, YouView — may now offer the smoothest experience of the lot (albeit without any EPG integration), as its box seems to be more comfortable outputting a compatible signal. That won’t be much help to others, however, so we’ve asked Microsoft’s PR if there’s any progress towards a fix, and in the meantime you might want to try a possible workaround from a reader at HDTVTest.

[Thanks, Barry]

Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD

Comments

Source: The Guardian

A fully functional replica of the Batmobile from the 1989 Michael Keaton Batman film will be going up for auction Nov. 30. Many replicas have been made of the various models of Batmobile, but none with quite this level of authenticity. For starters, the flamethrower, afterburner, nine-inch-rise hydraulics and remote start all work. Oh, and […]

If you didn’t think UK domain names could get any shorter, they soon will be. In an announcement today, the UK’s domain registry said it will soon launch its simpler .uk domain in a bid to remain cool with businesses and bloggers. While new registrations are encouraged, ten million existing customers (that have registered either a .co.uk or .org.uk address) won’t need to rush: they’ll have five years to claim a shorter version of their current address. News of the .uk address comes less than a week after ICANN gave London the go-ahead to offer .london addresses to “businesses, organisations and individuals”. If all of this UK-related domain news is too much for you to handle, come back in February 2014 — that’s when we’ll get a definitive .uk launch date.

[Image Credit: friendlydragon, Flickr]

Filed under: Internet

Comments

Via: The Telegraph

Source: Nominet