I flew down to Los Angeles for a few days last week to attend the CTIA show at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Although a lot of people complained how the show was significantly smaller than the Spring show, I had a great time walking through the show floor and checking out all that the wireless industry had to offer.

I think the biggest shock to me was how funky Ringtones, and scandalous wallpapers has become a multi-million dollar industry. Consumers seem to be eating them up, all in the name of customization.

Another shock for me was the amount of control and barriers to entry that existed in the industry. With HipCal and the Web (the normal web, not the mobile web), all we needed was a $40/year webhost and a few hours during the day to start coding the service. Things seem to be far more different for the wireless internet, or even the wireless applications space. The amount of effort and funding necessary to take an idea to market for a mobile application is monumental, very much un-Web 2.0.

All these shocks aside, I did get to see what I went for, cool phones. I love cool phones. Here are some things I found interesting at the show:

Motorola had quite possiblity the largest and sexiest booth at the show, sporting all of their phones. The phones looked great, the phone UI was still weak, as usual.

Their biggest push was their new Motorola Q, which seemed to be leading the pack in the industry for small lightweight mobile phones that gave instant access to e-mail and broadband access.

Blackberries, going forward in full force had a number of very sexy looking small factor devices at their booth.

Unfortunately, their booth was so crowded with their own employees, it was nearly impossible to get in there and actually check out their new devices.

Following suit to the Motorola Q, I saw atleast two other devices supporting the same form factor and design. Pictured here is the i-mate device.

Nokia had similar device at the show as well (forgot to get a picture of it).

All the booth sexiness aside, I felt the strongest presence was established by Treo. Not only did they have a booth presenting their handhelds, they also had an entire area dedicated to specialized applications that are available on the Palm Treo. It jived well with the general trend at the CTIA show for hardware manufacturs to attract to developers.

The coolest thing I found by far at the show was a small booth tucked away on the Qualcom floor displaying the availability of Macromedia Flash Lite on BREW phones. This got me really exicted since it finally showed promise of moving away from the dinky interfaces that phones traditionally have and moving to more fluid, animated, user centric interfaces. Unfortunately, I was dismayed to find that developers would have to go thorugh the same pains of certification, testing, and getting “on deck” in order to release a mobile application on the Flash platform as well.

Overall, it was a great show. I think the wireless industry still has a bit of growing to do before it starts to attract truly innovative developers that will bring unique applications for consumers. Right now, the barriers to entry are just far too high, which makes it impossible for the smart-creative-joe-shmoe to create an application and make it available for people to use on their mobile phones.