It’s been quite the week of rumor and speculation, with new handsets, government arguments and price speculation all churning through the cellular rumor-mill.  On the handset front, Verizon’s ridiculously-named U940 ‘Glyde’ – the CDMA version of the F700 slider-smartphone – showed up in its clearest pre-announcement photoshoot yet, complete with shots of the new interface.  Meanwhile, another Verizon smartphone blessed with full QWERTY, the LG VX9100, gained some high-quality photos of its own and a new brandname – enV2 – to boot.  No official release date for either of these two handsets, but CDMA buyers looking for messaging phones will soon have plenty to choose from.

Over in India, though, message addicts started off the week believing they were facing the loss of the BlackBerry push-email service: reports suggested that, because RIM were refusing to hand over decryption algorithms to the Indian government, the whole network was in danger of being pulled.  India’s Department of Telecommunications later went on record saying that banning the system was never being considered, but they’re still pushing for access to all messages transmitted.

Back in the US, and LG grabbed further headlines with the launch of the Glimmer on Alltel that went on sale on Thursday.  EV-DO, a 2-megapixel camera and GPS all combine with a large touchscreen, packed into a relatively compact slider-handset.  Of course, we knew it was coming as LG Korea helpfully put out a pre-announcement press release before Alltel’s official launch.

Apple’s iPhone SDK continued to pull in pageviews, too, with the news that it had been downloaded 100,000 times in the first four days.  More and more big-name developers are climbing on-board the official app juggernaut (this week saw game coders id join the fray), but we also found out that space on the iPhone Developer Programme is not just limited to those who can afford the $99 membership fee: it turns out Apple have “limited” places during the programme beta, and many would-be developers got rejection letters on Friday.  Still, the fact that the iPhone Dev Team have managed to hack Apple’s Firmware 2.0 for the handset – making it compatible not only with unofficial third-party apps but any official Apple software or updates – and all three months in advance of it actually launching, should cheer everyone up.  Check out the photos and video here.

You get the feeling that all those rejected developers would be welcome over at Android; Google’s Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms, went on the marketing offensive with some confident predictions about Android handset sales and more than a little smackdown for the iPhone’s capabilities.  Google’s 750,000 Android downloads (since November last year) and $10m developer fund had been looking pretty impressive, but the degree of interest in developing for, as Miner said, “a single manufacturer” seems to have taken them by surprise.

Far more surprising, perhaps, is Virgin Mobile USA’s dire financial report for Q1 2008; analysts had previously expected 130,000 new customers to join the pre-pay network this quarter, and Virgin’s prediction of just 5,000 to 20,000 sent their share price tumbling by 54-percent.  Honestly, it’s almost enough to make Sprint and Motorola look successful.