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No News Is Bad News

The CTIA Wireless show had its unofficial kick-off last night at the Mobile Focus event at Orlando's Peabody Hotel. There was a surprising lack of news from the mini-show floor, and there wasn't even any good industry gossip. What gives?

Is this already shaping up to be a boring, ho-hum CTIA? I certainly hope I didn't sit through two separate delays at the airport yesterday, followed by an extremely long taxi line wait upon landing in Orlando, to be faced with no news.

While most major news from CTIA Wireless will be breaking later this morning, there's usually a nice amount of buzz the night before. Last night at the Mobile Focus event there was none. No buzz. No, "Did you hear what so and so is going to do?" Zilch.

There were zero new and interesting smartphones, that's for sure. Yeah, OK, HTC has a new Windows Mobile 6-based form factor or two, but nothing super surprising. And a T-Mobile rep told me that it will be releasing the HTC Dash smartphone (which was unveiled at 3GSM) in the near future, and even went to say that it's the first Windows Mobile 6 device that will be available for the U.S market.

There was nothing new and exciting from Palm, though their PR reps were happily talking up the Treo 680 and 750 like they were brand-new devices.

No new handsets from RIM, Motorola, or Nokia. Motorola even delayed the news that was supposed to break today until tomorrow. Hmmm.

One Nokia rep did tell me that the N95 über-device I ranted about last week will eventually be available to U.S. customers through unofficial sales channels. It will be available before the end of the second quarter for somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 to $600. Interesting price points and release timing, considering the impending launch of the iPhone. What was most interesting is that the N95 that ships to the U.S. will be the global variant, meaning it will still have Wi-Fi included.

LG, Kyocera, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson did introduce a handful of mid-range consumer phones. Some of them were actually pretty cool.

But that's about it.

All I can say is, stay tuned. Hopefully the 9 o'clock hour will see a change in the amount of new and interesting things we have to write about.

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