Today at CTIA Yahoo announced oneConnect for the Apple iPhone. The stand-alone app aims to aggregate all your social networks into one place. Naturally, all your favorites are included: Facebook, YouTube, Dopplr, Twitter, Flickr, even Friendster. Of course Yahoo being Yahoo, others are included too.

Read the rest over on MobileCrunch.

Earlier this year at CES I got to spend some time with Microsoft’s Surface device, and I was impressed by what they’re doing. I’ll admit I went in with the attitude of “oh, touchscreen table, big deal”, but it’s far, far more than that.

Earlier today we brought you news that Surface was going to start appearing in AT&T stores, perhaps as customer service kiosks, and now we have a date: April 17. That’s rather soon.

If you haven’t had a chance to check Surface out yet, make a stop in to your local store. It’s worth it.

I have a friend who’s obsessed with Second Life. She doesn’t play it much, but she’s in love with the idea. And she’s in the market for a new cellphone. Perhaps I shouldn’t tell her about this new Second Life client Samsung is planning on making available for some of its handsets.

Is it a good idea? We don’t know. Is it a good idea my easily obsessed friends know about this? No.

Sprint’s Instinct is supposed to be one of the better iPhone pretenders. Biggs lauded its user interface while simultaneously panning other n’er do wells for their haphazard use of haptic or multitouch-for-multitouch’s sake. So you would think the phone, which is, nearest I can tell, one of the standouts at this year’s CTIA, would have more than a handful of column inches devoted to it.

Doesn’t appear to be the case, a Lexis Nexis (Academic) search reveals.

Compare it to the iPhone, which was officially unveiled January 9, 2007 at MacWorld. Within 24 hours, as the screenshot above shows, some 409 articles, press releases and the like mention “iPhone” in the Nexis database (under the US Newspapers and Wires category).

The Instinct, 24 hours after its April 1, 2008 debut, has a grand total of 16 articles. Twenty-five times fewer articles in the same time frame.

Hi-res version of ’sprint instinct’ results

I’m no iPhone apologist—frequent readers know I’m far more interested in today’s Champions League results than whether or not the iPhone/Instinct outsells the Instinct/iPhone—and this idea came to me while sitting in class a few minutes ago, so it’s not like I’m out to “get” the Instinct or anything, just an observation more than anything else. (Run on sentences, ftw.) But if Sprint truly wants the Instinct to resurrect its shrinking business, as detailed in BusinessWeek today, it may want to do a better job of marketing it.

The iPhone was introduced while CES was still going on last year, and pretty much every one of my friends and co-workers at CES (the Giz guys, other bloggers, the magazine people I know, etc.) knew CES was finished then and there. Like, the iPhone debuted and destroyed CES’ reason for being. Consumer technology? That’s the consumer technology for the foreseeable future, way out in San Francisco while we’re shuffling around the Las Vegas convention center.

Instinct came out yesterday at a cellphone conference. If Sprint was so adamant (confident?) about the phone, it at least could have rented out some floor space in NY or SF a couple days before or after CTIA to say, “OK, this is was we have.” As it stands, the phone is just one of many. And no one’s writing about it.

Sprint launched a handful of new phones today at CTIA, and they were thoughtful enough to make a summary page including all of the phones and devices in one spot with specs, press releases, images, and fact sheets.

This isn’t hard work. This is Webmastering 101. This is what the Internet is for. And note that Sprint isn’t trying to make you buy the phones, jump through hoops, or use you as an ATM? Well done.

The other carriers should pay attention to how Sprint’s using their Website and CTIA together to get the word out. AT&T’s hasn’t been updated, neither has T-Mo’s or Verizon’s. They’re losing out on an opportunity to be first in people’s minds, and it’s a problem with the cellphone industry.

tia complained to fcc about repeaters, said they were essentially jammers asked for them to be banned.
but repeater manufacturers have hired lobbyists/lawyers, and if my sources are accurate, things seem to be going their way. wilson electronics actually used a story about someone who had his leg cut off in an dirt biking accident in the desert and whose life was saved because he was able to use a repeater.
i imagine they might have some sort of further testing on repeaters to allow them, and to make sure they don’t oscillate
i mean, they might add a further certification beyond the normal fcc one

What does this mean? It means places like my dead zone house and Arrington’s pad will be completely off the cellular grid, reverting many of us to Stone Age. Well I, for one, refuse to eat uncooked mastodon meat. Watch this space for more info.

Available the first half of next year, Microsoft’s System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 will allow IT departments to remotely administer mobile phones, allowing them to do cool tricks like "turn off a phone’s camera and prevent the use of unauthorized messaging services."

For the end user, it’ll be similar to how you’re able to connect to your workplace PC from home over a VPN connection. You’ll be able to access certain files that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to grab over a regular connection, run "Web-based applications that reside on the corporate intranet," and fun stuff like that. Basically, you’ll be able to work all the time from wherever you can get a signal. Hooray!

Microsoft Unveils Remote Mobile Management Software [washingtonpost.com]

It’s very rare for us tech journalists/drunks to get a chance to let you, the reading public, get a glance behind the curtain to see the surfeit of riches we feast upon nightly. Case in point: every year, at all the big shows (CES, CTIA, all the huge shows where that tech folks love) two companies, Pepcom and Showstoppers, hold little sideshows where some of the exhibitors come to interact directly with the press. See, when press wander the floor, they’re usually cranky and angry. So in order to get even a minute’s face time, companies will rent a table at these little shows and get a chance to talk to us hacks amidst a smörgåsbord of shrimp, booze, and crazy beads that they make us wear.

The industry works like this: there are two big-name tech journos in the world, David “But Papa, I Want to SING!” Pogue and Walt “8-Track” Mossberg. I believe that companies like Sony send guys are given pygmy children festooned with diamonds every Christmas and they basically get to say who and what they want to see. About 99% of a company’s marketing budget goes to getting those guys to lay hands upon the latest products. The other 1% goes to us, the “working press.” The more of us they hit, the better it looks on a PR report. PR folks want to talk to us face-to-face, show us a few things, and release us back into the wild. They would kill to be able to sit down with us and drink some beers simply because it gives them a chance to slip us roofies and force us to review their products favorably. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it happens.

Anyway, the folks at CNET are a hardworking lot and they wanted to create an after-Pepcom party in New York where bloggers could drink booze and post. David “The Wonk” Berlind was spearheading this “bloghaus” and asked Pepcom if they could invite a few industry reps to sit with the bloggers and answer questions. Pepcom responded by saying that industry reps were upset that he would suggest such an outrageous thing and that anyone holding a post-Pepcom event would be banned from Pepcom events. This is kind of like banning a bar crawl after a softball game — you’re basically pissing off people who are hot, tired, and have been ducking balls for three hours. The result isn’t pretty.

Ron Pepper, Chris O’Malley (proprietors) and the rest of the crew at Pepcom can take their stinkin’ events like Digital Experience and, well {fill in the blank}. Not only do Pepcom events deserve to be boycotted by journalists, writers, and bloggers, I’m suggesting that exhibitors such as Nokia, Lenovo, Belkin, Palm, Skype, Kodak, HP, Nikon, Casio, Brookstone, Plantronics, Sandisk, Sharp, GE, Toshiba, Kingston and the many others who pay good money to exhibit at Pepcom’s events think hard about the sort of behavior they’re endorsing. Pepcom has unjustifiably come down on me and my company (CNET Networks) like a ton of bricks for doing something as simple as hosting a post-event gathering after one of their events. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever come to its events to cover the vendors and technologies exhibiting at them again.

Whoa, right? This is very insider stuff and it’s funny that Berlind posted it publicly.

Why am I telling you all this meta-journalism stuff? Simply because it shows you all what kind of fancy lives we’re living. We get a lot of flack for being Microsoft or Apple pawns and for taking money from Sony to write favorable reviews about Minidisc. We aren’t pawns and we don’t make money and, in fact, people are trying to make our jobs harder, not easier. This also gives you a chance to see what kind of cat fights we have to deal with during our day-to-day coverage and the magic behind the dick jokes and stupid puns that fill your day with joy.

In all honesty, I’d rather outfit a Roomba with a video camera and get a live feed from most of these shows and after shows (and I’d probably get a more interesting coverage with the Roomba bumping up against walls and chair legs) than actually go to these things. However, we must persevere, musn’t we? So now you know how sausage is made, kids.

Pepcom to CNET: If you organize any get-togethers after our events, we’ll ban you [CNET]

Corporate dudes, please don’t try to be funny. It never works and you just end up looking silly. Take this guy at CTIA. He’s going on and on about how much the iPhone will change human history like it’s the wheel. Then he mentions a bunch of no-good punk kids and how they wanted him to “pull some strings” so they could get one early. Very funny, sir. Methinks you should quit your overpaid job as an executive and hit the comedy circuit. Pryor’s got nothing on you.

Video surfaces of iPhone at CTIA [Electronista]

HTC Announces CDMA Versions of New Smartphones [PhoneScoop]

This is a bit long, but Vincenct from Slashgear was nice enough to film me talking with the folks at Panasonic Toughbooks. Check out my double chin!

For your enjoyment, a recreation of the noble and traditional art of Japanese Sumo as performed by two drunken fools.

Hidey Ho. It’s about 3pm in LA right now and we’re winding down from a whirlwind of meetings that started early this morning. Add in the Apple announcements – meh except for the iTV – and the Crunchsters are beat!

Here’s a quick recap of the show today. QuickPlay showed us this video/audio streaming solution while Nokia amazed the hell out of us with their new N-Gage platform that is launching on Series 60 phones.

We saw Sprint’s new network cards and a new handset, an international Windows Mobile phone, the IP-830W. It’s a Windows Mobile slider that’s pretty hefty. Trying to grab some images as we speak. We also saw the Palm 750v, complete with hot PR lady.

Otherwise, this show is more about enterprise and GPS. Everyone and their dog had some sort of streaming video solution and everyone wants to pump out media and TV to the cellphones before Apple gets around to it.

Symbian showed us some of their wares, but we’ll meet with them again tomorrow. Here we see a bunch of UIQ phones in the wild.

We’ll have some excellent footage tonight once our coverage partner, SlashPhone processes it.

If you’re at the show, AIM me at johnbiggsny or email at john @t crunchgear dooter com.