CTIA opened yesterday, with some exciting Nokia and Symbian related news as well.

AT&T announced the long-awaited Nokia E71x Symbian powered smartphone. E71 was the PC Mags editors choice last September, and the magazine's author still today says it to be his personal choice for a phone, on and off, for months.

T-Mobile introduces a new service, Visual Voicemail, first on Symbian S60 devices. Visual Voicemail is a system where the the message is pushed directly to your device instead of stored on a server. This is a good improvement, as anyone who'se tried to listen to their voice messages from abroad would understand. A video message system will be helpful when listening to your voice mails in a noisy environment, for people who are hard of hearing, or just to give additional information about the person leaving the message. For example, sometimes you don't hear well who called, but a video image will help.

A company called Good Technology launches browser based device management and security solutions for enterprises and government. The service works on Symbian S60, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and PalmOS platforms.

The company SEVEN is upgrading their Integrated Mobile Messaging Platform to include calendar functionality. The system features one UI for entering your corporate email, personal email, calendar and contacts applications, and is compatible with all the major device platforms including Symbian, Microsoft, Java, Brew, Palm and Android.

A bit vague, but interesting piece of news also from Samsung. While introducing their first Windows based Wimax device Mondi, a Samsung spokesperson said that  "Samsung was releasing a software developer kit next month as part of its Samsung Mobile Innovator Program to foster creation of widgets that would allow Windows to run on Android or Symbian." Let's follow that one.

Speaking of Wimax, it seems that the "OS battle" is becoming - yawn - yesterday's news and all eyes are now turning to a showdown on CDMA vs. GSM.. err..  no, sorry  CDMA2000 vs. UMTS .. uhh....  I mean of course  Wimax vs. LTE. Phew! Violent stuff, this ICT.

In that article, Verizon execs are lining up behind LTE, and also commenting software platforms. Verizon values the possibility to create their own software on top on the operating system, and do put so much weight on the operating system itself. Verizon has recently joined the Joint Innovation Lab for creating widget that run on any mobile platform. This is good news for anyone providing an open platform, and not so good news for those providing a closed OS.

Nokia's very own Anssi Vanjoki compares Wimax to Betamax, the parallel techology that slowly dyed and left VHS as the dominant one. Yesterday I was hoping for Nokia to take more risk. Anssi delivered my wish immediately, although this sort of press coverage was not the kind of risk I was talkig about.

Last but not least, Symbian Foundation's bloggers dinner has brought postings in PC World, Lora's space, Uwarunkowac, Kyle Welsh, and many many others. Also, the announcement on TI OMAP hardware reference platform has generated a lot of blogging and discussion over the past 24 hours.