The third generation of Microsoft’s Zune portable media player product line has been talked about and speculated for quite a while now, but very little has managed to leak out of Redmond, until now.

Source:Third generation Zune pictures leak: 120GB and 16GB

Thanks again to everyone who made it out to the Hotel Sax for the Gizmodo’s Chicago reader meetup. For those who didn’t make it out, I think the night went pretty well, as people alternated between the line for the bar and the dual Rock Band 2 stations, the official ecosystem of the event. We never got a firm headcount, but we’d estimate the attendance to have been just south of 200 people, an eclectic mix of ages, professions and musical abilities. Click through for the full gallery.

Hopefully we can all meet up again in the future. And a special thanks to the Hotel Sax for throwing such a successful event.

Photos by Stephanie Kapaldo and Adam McCrimmon.

Source:Chicago Gizmodo Party, In Photos [Reader Meetup]

On Tuesday, Google will unveil its new iPhone competitor: the HTC Dream smartphone from T-Mobile, which will run the Android operating system. How do the two match up?

Source:Android: Google's Dream, Apple's Nightmare?

The Apple part of the iPhone battery class-action lawsuit has been dismissed by U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly, who looked at the claims brought by Jose Trujillo and deemed them as dumbtastically stoopeed. Not exactly in those words, but I know that’s exactly what he meant with his words:

Apple disclosed on the outside of the iPhone package that the “battery has limited recharge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced by Apple service provider.” Under the circumstances, no reasonable jury could find that deception occurred.

However, AT&T is still a defendant in the case. Judge Kennelly denied the company’s motion to compel arbitration, saying that at the time of purchase Trujillo didn’t have access to the terms of service documentation. The next hearing will be on September 29. [Bloomberg]

Source:iPhone Battery Lawsuit Dismissed, Steve Won't Send Luca Brasi [Apple]

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We’ve already seen a few apparent Windows 7 screenshots and videos turn up, and it looks like there could soon be plenty more where those came from, as Microsoft has now officially announced that it’ll be handing out “pre-beta” builds of the OS at both the Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in late October and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in early November. As we had heard previously, you can also expect to hear plenty of technical details about the OS straight from Microsoft at PDC and, who knows, we may even get word of an actual release date.

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Source:Microsoft to hand out Windows 7 "pre-betas" at PDC, WinHEC