Hasta La Gadget!

Well, it was only a matter of time — first the leaked press shots of this elusive HTC Spark (although possibly misidentified as the Mondrian back then — note the shinier earpiece in the leaked AT&T ad), and now the real thing is in the hands of some lucky hardware tester. Fortunately for us, this guy also happens to have a naughty friend over at xda-developers — you’ll see in his photos that HTC Hub is alive and well on this 8GB handset, but otherwise, there’s not much info coming out of here. Regardless, feel free to head over to the source link for more Windows Phone 7 eye candy — you’ll need to register first, though, so we’ve grabbed a few shots below to get things going.

[Thanks, Adam]

HTC Spark leaked in the wild, shows off plenty of WP7 goodness originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  xda-developers  | Email this | Comments

Going from Justin Bieber to Stevie Wonder is a fairly awkward transition–perhaps we should have asked Quincy Jones for some tips. Particularly awkward is the fact that this Wonder story is actually pretty serious business. Aside from being a musical genius, the singer is a self-styled activist for the rights of the blind and visually-impaired.

This week, Wonder flew to Geneva to address the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization, in order to discuss the lack of access to books for the blind and visually-impaired. The singer pointedly asked the committee to help him, “end the information deprivation that keeps the visually impaired in the dark.”

Wonder took the issue up with the World Intellectual Property Organization due to copyright protections that often prohibit the blind and visually impaired from converting texts into formats that they can consume.

Google’s Public Policy blog has a great quote from Wonder,

While it’s critical to not act to the detriment of the authors who created these great works that enlighten and nourish our minds, hearts and souls, we must develop a protocol that allows the easy import and export of copyrighted material so that people with print disabilities can join the mainstream of the literate world…. It can be done.

You can watch Wonder’s 10 minute UN address after the jump.

Oh god. I just wish there were more ways to express my love for Justin Bieber. What’s that, Monster Cable? Now I can cram my Bieber Fever in my ears with a pair of purple headphones? Dreams really do come true.

The king of Twitter finally has his own pair of headphones–two, in fact–thanks to the Monster’s Beats By Dre, the line of audio products that has brought you branded accessories by such musical luminaries as Lady Gaga and Diddy.

There’s a $199 pair of over-ear headphones and a $119 pair of earbuds. Both are purple, and both will likely make you the hit of middle schools everywhere.

Ouch. There are times when the market behaves like a disappointed child on Christmas morning. No one expected Nintendo to fare well from yesterday’s announcement that the company’s much-hyped 3DS portable gaming console would miss the holiday season in Japan, but a drop of 9.34 percent in the Osaka Securities Exchange–ouch.

Nintendo first announced the 3DS back in June at E3 in Los Angeles, touting the player’s ability to simulate 3D gaming without the aid of glasses. The device was met with raves from the tech community after a series of short demos. A week later, Nintendo announced that the portable console would be released in the US in March 2011. Most still expected it to see a holiday release in its native Japan.

During a earnings call yesterday, Nintendo told the press that the device would not see a Japanese release until February, cutting its profit estimates by 55 percent, leaving the company without a blockbuster device during a holiday season that will no doubt be dominated by Sony’s PlayStation Move and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect–motion controllers that took center stage at their companies’ respective E3 presentations.

You don’t get to be a futurist unless you make some bold, sometimes unrealistic predictions, right? According to an upcoming report from the New Media Consortium, students will be able to kiss all of those backbreaking college textbooks goodbye in the next two to three years.

Laurence F. Johnson, futurist and founder of the organization said the following in a statement issued today, “The prospect of holding all the materials you will need in a single device weighing less than a kilo is a powerful driver from the student side, and we are seeing a number of universities that are pushing publishers to move in this direction.”

That’s all well and good, and who among us wouldn’t have traded in years of lower back pain for a shiny new eBook reader, given the chance? But does it seem realistic? As e-reader prices continue to drop, there seems little doubt that deployment of the devices in an educational setting will continue to grow more and more commonplace.

As for full deployment, that seems more dependant on specific institutions. Let’s face it, some school are just quicker to adopt technology than others–you know how, at the beginning of every school year, you hear about colleges giving all of their students iPods or laptops?

Plenty will no doubt happily ride the PR wave that comes along with early adoption. As for widescale deployment–well, we’ll see…