This week, the biggies of wireless attended the CTIA conference in Florida. As always, there were some big announcements, such as from Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S) regarding its huge mobile build-out of WiMAX.

Dipanshu Sharma, the founder of V-Enable, was also there (his firm develops voice-activated wireless applications). Here are some of his takeaways:

Mobile TV
Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) MediaFLO handsets got a lot of attention. Last year mobile TV was dominated by companies using IP streaming for watching TV on the phone. Streaming over IP clogs carriers' networks, so this year both MedioFLO and DVB-H were showcased. It was mostly MediaFLO that stole the show for mobile TV. Verizon already had a MediaFLO-enabled handset, and Cingular has promised to launch by end of this year. I checked out the phones myself and have to say the video quality was almost HD. For the near term, the service is marred by lack of channels (mobiTV has more channels), but I am sure QUALCOMM (NASDAQ: QCOM) will resolve that sooner than later.

Slim phones
Lots and lots of slim phones. I saw one Samsung phone that was slim and wide, rather ugly. On the other hand, Samsung's music phone with screens on both sides was quite innovative.

LBS (Location Based Services) and local search
We saw a few LBS companies demonstrating use of phones' GPS capabilities for navigation. Telenav and NIM have commercial products for the same. As for local search and 411, V-Enable announced that its product won best of show (wireless software) at CTIA by Laptop Magazine. Infospace (NASDAQ: INSP) announced a free local search product for RIM's (NASDAQ: RIMM) BlackBerry.

Mobile advertising
I probably met so many mobile advertising companies that have differentiators that sound all the same that I can't even remember their names. Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) also announced its mobile advertising product. It's unclear if there is room for so many mobile advertising startups to exit, especially when Yahoo! and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) are entering the market very fast.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.

CTIA's wireless wonders originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.