What, me late? Lost and couldn’t find the room? Never. Anyway, the upside is that I missed CTIA head honcho Steve Largent’s standarized bitching about taxes and regulation.

Downside: I wasn’t so late as to miss Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam bitching about taxes and regulation. To hear these guys tell it, the only issue facing the mobile industry is the spectre of increased government regulation of operators’ businesses.

McAdam says we’ll all wear bracelets that will monitor our health, we’ll move content from our handsets to our TVs etc. Visionary stuff, this.

Oh dammit. I didn’t miss Largent, he’s up after McAdam. Curses!

Stat attack: 255 million plus subs in the US at the end of 2007, up 22 million in the year. They use over 1 trillion minutes of voice per year. Annual data revenues for operators was up 53% in 2007 to $23 billion. 48 billion SMS per month, up 120 or so percent over last year.

Here comes FCC chairman Kevin Martin for his regular appearance. I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict he’s wearing a red tie.

I wish the Hilton sports book would have given me odds on that. Martin’s red tie is in the house.

He says the “wireless” industry is seeing dramatic growth and exciting innovation. Claims there’s a “remarkable” level of competition in the US mobile industry, says wireless is “the poster child for competition.”

Martin’s give big ups to the 700 MHz auction and the broadband services it should enable, lauding its ability to deliver mobile broadband to everybody. My thought: if that stuff is so important, why’s the FCC dragging its feet on the white spaces spectrum?

Big news: says he’s today circulating a notice to commissioners denying Skype’s petition to extend the Carterfone ruling to mobile. That draws applause — probably from the operator employees in the crowd.

I’m having a hard time getting over people clapping Martin’s announcement about the Skype decision. Says a lot about this crowd, and about the state of the US mobile industry in general. The petition by Skype may have been a little misguided, but it deserves open debate and discussion, not an off-the-cuff dismissal buried in the middle of a speech to a friendly crowd. I’m used to being disappointed and annoyed by the operator-centric talks from Steve Largent and the operator honchos at the top of the CTIA; Martin’s talk did little to dissuade me that he’s much more than the operators’ crony puppet.

Oh well, at least Richard Branson’s up next. Here’s hoping he entertains. His intro video has some blaring Beastie Boys music, doesn’t seem to be going down well with the suits. Plus, they dropped the f-bomb — forgive me if I interpret that as a subtle jab at Kevin Martin, given his penchant for prudish broadcast regulation.

Heh, he says that he couldn’t register the Virgin name for his record company in the UK in the late 60s, as the patent office there felt it was “too rude.” He then tells the story of Virgin’s first flight — he was flying from the British Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico and his flight was cancelled, stranding him and 200 other passengers. He made some calls to charter companies, and chartered a plane for $2000. He then got a blackboard and wrote “Virgin Airways, single flight to Puerto Rico $39″, and sold out the flight and turned a profit.

Branson asks if anybody’s signed up for a Virgin Galactic flight yet. Don’t see any hands go up. He asks if anybody wants to go to space, and some people clap. Not sure if that drew any more applause than K-Mart’s news about denying the Skype petition.

Now he’s talking up his Virgle JV with Google that wants to send a giant Noah’s Ark to Mars. Happy April 1 to you, too, Richard.

Richard’s announcing the headliners for this summer’s Virgin Music Festival. Time for a surprise guest? Nope. Oh well. But then he floods the stage with volunteers to go on a one-way trip to Mars with Virgle.

Microsoft’s Robbie Bach up next, presumably to talk up Windows Mobile 6.1. Says he’s going to talk about how MS enables innovation. Heh, interestingly, Bach is in a suit and tie (red, natch). Contrast that to his much more laid-back and casual dress at CES. Horses for courses, I guess.

Bach says being ahead of RIM and Apple in market share gives it a position to drive change and innovation in the industry. No comment. But he does make the point that the Windows Mobile platform does allow for choice in form factors and other handset features. Touche Apple.

Cites PlayReady DRM as an example of Microsoft’s innovation in the mobile market. Again, no comment from me, insert your own.

Windows Mobile 6.1, new features, blah blah blah. Doesn’t seem as game-changing or interesting as Bach would like us to believe. New home screen looks sort of nice, and there are other incremental updates. See Mobile Burn for more info.

Two things from 6.1 worth mentioning: a new “Getting Started” set of services to help with initial device setup. Nice to see MS at least thinking about reducing user pain here. Also, the guy doing the demo stresses that many WinMo 6 devices are upgradeable to the new OS release. No idea how strenuous that upgrade process is, but other OS vendors should take note.

Showing off how you can look at the native Facebook and BBC News sites on Windows Mobile. Um, it’s 2008 right?

Guy from Sony Ericsson comes out to show off the Xperia X1. I still think this is an odd situation, given the company’s investment in UIQ and long-running support of Symbian. The demo is focusing on the “tile” user interface on the Xperia… it’s as if they’re just using WinMo as the platform, and tossing out the WinMo UI. Perhaps it’s better suited to that sort of thing than Symbian? Further thought on that — Danger will presumably move to a WinMo-based platform as well, I’d imagine. Interesting possibilities for custom UI over WinMo, maybe.

Sprint’s new CEO Dan Hesse is up next. “Pole position in a new industry, that’s our objective.” Talking up push to talk, must be in the same anachronistic boat as the MS browser guy. Shows a mildly amusing TV ad for PTT, but all I take from it is that the iDEN phone they show at the end still looks chunky — and still has an external antenna.

He says operators have fallen short of the mark in pricing and availability of mobile data services. Obvious point, but fair play for a mobile operator CEO to say that in public. He earns another point by saying that while unlimited voice tariffs are good, they don’t answer the demands of today’s consumer by ignoring data and messaging. Hence the company’s $100 for “everything” — voice, text. picture messages, data, etc — plan. I take a point back by pointing out to myself that $100 a month means it’s still too expensive for the bulk of US mobile consumers.

Whips out the Samsung Instinct, says it’s cool because it’s fast (EV-DO Rev. A) and has a customizable UI. Says it comes with all sorts of pre-loaded content, but also stresses ease of use. It looks like an iPhone knockoff, and that’s what people are going to take away. Watch for the “Sprint’s iPhone competitor” headlines.

We’ve hit the 1 hour 50 mark, and a steady stream of people are leaving. If Hesse’s got any big guns to whip out, he’d better do it soon. Instead, he rolls a promo video for the operator’s Xohm WiMAX network.

Hesse wraps up by talking about how Sprint wants to improve mobile freedom by making things easier for content providers and application developers. He then says they made their network more powerful by turning on their transcoding system, and says they’ll do even more to improve their network for developers and make their lives easier. No, I don’t understand how one follows the other, either.