It’s usually tough to summarise a week when we’ve had a big cellular show, and this one is little different.  Of course, the show in question was CTIA Wireless 2008, held in Las Vegas, and you can review all the coverage courtesy of this tag.  Of the new handsets, Sprint grabbed headlines with the Instinct by Samsung, an obvious iPhone rival with full touchscreen, haptic feedback, GPS and EV-DO, Nokia finally announced their WiMAX upgrade to the N810 Internet Tablet, and AT&T showed off their mobile TV-friendly Vu by LG.  Are any of the three as interesting as an Android prototype that’s capable of running Quake, though?  Check out our video and let me know!

Looking elsewhere at the show, Plantronics released their Discovery 925 Bluetooth headset – which we promptly unboxed and reviewed – while Microsoft announced a deal with AT&T to put their Surface multitouch video table in a number of the carrier’s stores.  In fact it’s been negotiations all round at AT&T, with CEO Ralph de la Vega revealing they’ve been in talks with Google about introducing Android-powered handsets to the carrier’s range.

While the Instinct might have been making positive headlines, elsewhere Sprint’s tardy timekeeping for WiMAX picked up disappointment.  Despite a number of WiMAX-equipped devices at CTIA, they’ve delayed the roll-out of the high-speed network until the Summer.  Shortly after, AT&T and Verizon – out from under the FCC gag order – started discussing their LTE 4G network intentions and how they plan on using their recently won spectrum.  2010 might seem a long way off for Verizon’s 4G launch, but it’s going to fly by if Sprint don’t cash in on WiMAX soon.

We’ve been heavy with iPhone rumor this week, with everyone from analysts, to journalists, to Apple stores and carrier partners themselves stoking the 3G fires.  Suffice to say, the latest is Walt Mossberg’s proclamation of a “3G iPhone in 60 days”, and if that’s not a deadline for Steve Jobs then I’m not sure what is.  Perhaps Apple is too busy looking for legal loopholes to shut down the Pwanage Tool, released by the iPhone Dev Team this week and already liberating iPhones all over.

Our traditional Motorola moment is the ailing company’s announcement that it would be binning a further 2,600 jobs this year, taking the number of redundancies to a whopping 10,000 since the start of 2007.  It’s all part of a cost-cutting exercise designed to save $500m by the end of the year; they seem to have forgotten that if you make alluring, popular handsets then you can afford all the expenses you want.

Bizarre incident of the week has to go to Nokia, who celebrated CTIA with a “Press Briefing in the Sky“: strapping them into a harness-equipped demo sled, in fact, and lifting them up on wires!  Thankfully Vincent didn’t appear to be afraid of heights; having seen the video, I’m not sure I would’ve faired so well!

Oh, and if you’ve been reading PHONE Magazine for a while, you may have noticed we’ve changed the layout of the site.  We’d love to hear what you think, so let us know in the comments!