Thousands of broadband subscribers in the United Kingdom who illegally downloaded pornography will soon have their identities exposed. The United Kingdom’s High Court has ordered O2, a large U.K.-based Internet service provider, to hand over personal details identifying more than 9,000 subscribers to Golden Eye International and Ben Dover Productions, two companies run by British porn actor and producer Lindsay Honey. The subscribers in question are found to have illegally download copies of copyright...

Citing issues with the user experience, O2 UK announced on Thursday that it “will not be selling” the BlackBerry PlayBook. The wireless carrier began notifying customers who had signed up for more information about its change of heart on Thursday. The carrier officially stated: “unfortunately there are some issues with the end to end customer experience,” but didn’t delve further into its reasons for the decision. We suspect it could be the lack of a native email client, an addit...

Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play in a black tuxedo not doing it for you? If you’re living under O2′s coverage area in the UK, you have an exclusive offering — the Xperia Play in white, complete with matching dock. If you are outside the UK, though, there’s still hope as availability of the white device outside of the UK hasn’t been announced just yet. A shot of the front of the handset after the break! (more…)

According to German carrier O2, the HTC 7 Pro — a full-QWERTY, horizontal sliding, Windows Phone 7 device — will hit store shelves sometime in January. The set has been, up till this point, rumored for U.S. based CDMA carrier Sprint, however, O2 uses GSM technology. The device boasts a 1 GHz processor, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a 3.6-inch display that tilts towards its user. No word on whether or not the GSM variant will show-up Stateside, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed...

Are you still reeling from last week’s Windows Phone 7 press event? Ballmer and Co. announced a staggering 10 handsets (and counting) right out of the gate, sporting their latest mobile OS. HTC, Samsung, Dell, LG among others, have pledged their alliance and announced handsets that will grace the world’s stage over the coming months. We have simplified things for our discerning readers, hit the jump for BGR’s definitive guide to Windows Phone 7 hardware. (more…)

T-Mobile UK has jumped the gun and revealed pricing for the, BlackBerry OS 6-toting Bold 9780. The  Bold 9780 is the successor to the aging, but wildly popular Bold 9700. According to Electricpig, the new BlackBerry will be available before Christmas. The handset will be available for £0 ($0, if you convert) if you sign 2 years of your life away for a £30/month. Reasonable, no? However, we still don’t have any info on tariff details.The three other major carriers in Blighty – O2, Orange and 3,...

Today, Microsoft announced that all five major UK wireless carriers — Orange, O2, T-Mobile, Three, and Vodafone — will be carrying handsets that run the Windows Phone 7 operating system. “It is wonderful now to have all of the UK’s network operators supporting the launch of Windows Phone 7,” said Alex Reeve, Microsoft UK’s director of the Mobile Business Group. We know plenty about the “who,” what we really want to know is the “when.” (moreR...

O2 UK announced today that it will only offer the iPhone 4 to current customers when the handset launches on June 24th. The wireless carrier cites extremely limited stock as the basis for this potentially controversial decision. Folks looking to score an iPhone by signing up now with O2 are out of luck as the iPhone will only be offered to wireless, home broadband, and home phone customers who have been with O2 since May 24th, 2010. Current customers will have to travel to a brick and mortar store to snag an ...

Apple’s iPhone 4 is a undeniably selling like wildfire both here in the States and overseas. Similar to the U.S., the UK iPhone is experiencing delayed availability with the ship by date now pushed back to July 14th. If you missed the June 24th and the July 2nd pre-order window, your only option now is to try to score an iPhone 4 from your local Apple store or your favorite wireless carrier at launch next week. Thankfully, many opportunities exist for the UK iPhone customer as, unlike the U.S. wher...

As if resident of the UK didn’t already have a line-up of handsets to chose from that would make even the most reserved American green with envy, today Dell announced that it and O2 will be releasing the Dell Streak in early June. A giant amongst smartphones, the Streak features a 5″ WVGA capacitive touchscreen display, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, 16GB of internal memory, support for microSD cards up to 32GB, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, 7.2Mbps HSDPA and 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. ...

Michael Dell took the stage at the Citrix Synergy conference yesterday and, like any good CEO with a hot, new product on the horizon, he could not resist the opportunity to show off a shiny new Dell Streak. While the crowd at the virtualization conference was entertained with a minute long preview of the handheld device, the rest of the world was given the juicy tidbit of information that confirms the Android device will land in Europe via O2 Telefonica in June and in the US via AT&T later this summer. An...

WebOS devices have long since extended their reach beyond the cozy confines of United States, but unfortunately paid apps have yet to be made available as they are in the US. This could all change in one week’s time, however, as Palm has notified developers that they will be able to sell apps through the App Catalog in Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Mexico and Spain starting on the 31st of March. If all goes according to plan, a large number of paid apps will be available on day one simply because Pa...

We envy every single Pre/Pixi user this morning, because for our money, we can’t think of a more enjoyable way to start the day than installing a software update for our beloved smartphone. And that’s just what those lucky devils will be doing because overnight Palm pushed out webOS 1.4. There’s a whole lotta awesome packed into this update, but we think we can sum it up in a few words: bug fixes, Flash support and video capture. Good stuff.UPDATE: Looks like it is not currently available fo...

Ars Technica has posted an interesting article, speculating that wireless carrier network congestion (especially in the case of AT&T) may not have so much to do with how much bandwidth your device is consuming, but rather how your smartphone is connecting to the network. (more…)