Hasta La Gadget!

The next time you’re in a Verizon Wireless store looking for accessories for your phone, you’ll also notice a more colorful collection of earbuds on the wall near the Bluetooth headsets. Wicked Audio has partnered with Verizon Wireless to include their two new lines of earbuds, the Metallics and the Jaw Breakers, onto store shelves for mobile phone owners looking for some earbuds to listen to music on their device.

Wicked Audio’s Metallics line come in five colors: white, pink, blue, black, and green , and are all made with a shiny, metallic coating on the back of the earbud, giving the earbuds their name. They’re noise isolating, light, portable, and affordable, coming in at $19.99 US per pair. The Jaw Breakers on the other hand feature gold-plated audio connectors and greater sound quality, are also noise-isolating , and come in four colors: white, pink, green, and black. They cost $29.99 per pair.

Both sets of earbuds come with several flexible earpieces that you can swap to fit your ears, and since they’re designed for use with mobile phones, they both have included in-line microphones that you can use to take calls in between listening to music. Both the Metallics and the Jaw Breakers are available now. 

On Thursday, Acer announced the Stream Android smartphone – although it’s unlikely that U.S. consumers will ever get their hands on it.

The Stream is a now-conventional slab-style Android phone running Android 2.1. While a press release issued by Acer doesn’t indicate the type of touchscreen used, the WVGA AMOLED screen measures 3.7 inches.  The phone is 11.2 mm thick.

Inside is a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, currently the high end of the market, 512 Mbytes of RAM, plus 2 Gbytes of internal flash memory and a bundled 8-Gbyte microSD card. The camera also includes one 5-Mpixel camera.

Connectivity options include 7.2-MBit/s HSDPA and 802.11n Wi-Fi, plus Bluetooth.

Some of the standout features, however, include an external HDMI cable, also a feature of the Sprint EVO 4G, Dolby Mobile sound, and the ability to record video up to 720p in resolution.

Acer has also included a redesigned multitouch interface, which the company promises will be common to most if not all of its new products, including laptops and all-in-one PCs. On top of that, Acer has added a custom phone UI, with a status bar that “appears as an innovative divider between logical spaces. It shows all
the essential information, providing shortcuts to most frequently used
settings and its position allows a very easy access to the settings or
notifications.”

Acer has also bundled Spinlets, a free music streaming service that connects to “major labels,” the company said.

Sounds neat, right? Unfortunately, Acer probably won’t bring to the phone to the U.S.

T-Mobile announced Monday that it has expanded its HSPA+ buildout to more cities in the Northeastern U.S.: New York, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse are now covered. Connecticut, Hartford, New Haven, Milford, and Stamford have HSPA+. Providence, Rhode Island is also included. HSPA+ potentially gives much faster data speeds to users with 3G-capable phones.

T-Mobile says it will also expand its HSPA+ network into Boston and Washington, D.C. “in the coming weeks.” The company also says its HSPA+ network now covers 30 million Americans and will cover 185 million Americans with “4G speeds” by the end of 2010.

T-Mobile has begun using the term 4G to stand in for HSPA+ in their press materials and will likely begin using it in advertising once more people are covered. This is not to be confused with Sprint’s 4G, which is based on completely different WiMAX technology. AT&T and Verizon have pledged that their own versions of 4G will go live in 2011.

The story is a familiar one: an employee takes a phone prototype for a spin in the real world, misplaces the thing, and the company bricks it. In this case, however, the company in question seemingly didn’t realize the device was missing before an eagle-eyed bystander snapped some shots of the handset.

The device in question is reportedly the Motorola Droid Shadow, rumored to be the second Verizon Android handset from Motorola. The phone was discovered in a Verizon corporate gym in Washington state. The Shadow was apparently picked up by a gym employee who confirmed some key details about the device with the Verizon employee who was tasked with picking the phone up.

According to Gizmodo: “[I]t has 16GB of internal storage, runs on a Snapdragon processor, has a HDMI port, and yes, the 8MP camera and 4.3-inch screen all checked out too.”

Judging from the photo, the device is also really, really large.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo.