I went to CTIA last week in Orlando. It was a great time for many reasons, but the highlight by far was the keynote on Thursday morning by former presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton. The lasting impression is how incredibly convincing Clinton’s passion can be when he speaks. Yes, I’ve heard him on television many times in the past, but the effect of hearing him live in front of 12,000 people was electrifying. The communal and “big loudspeaker” environment made it a rather special experience. But on to the technology.

1. For the most part the panels were interesting but not stunning. After a while, you start hearing the same things over and over. At 3GSM, the mantra was getting content onto handsets. At CTIA, it was all about platform convergence - how to make the TV, PC, and mobile play well together.

I thought this was an interesting difference between the 2 shows: 3GSM in Europe and CTIA in the U.S. As everyone knows, mobile usage in Europe and Asia is more advanced than it is here in the U.S. Europeans use their phones for a wider variety of tasks, use them more frequently, and it’s a much more prominent part of their daily culture than it is here. On the flip side, the U.S. has a much stronger relationship with TV and PCs on a daily basis than Europeans do. So it seems very natural that one population pushes to make mobile the primary content platform while the other is trying to make 3 different platforms work together.

2. One of the neatest things I saw was software-based motion detection from GestureTek. It uses the camera on the handset to determine how it’s moving and then translates that motion into gestures. Very cool. The demo worked pretty well, too. I was surprised at how responsive it was. GestureTek seems to be focused on this product as a gaming tool, so hopefully they can piggyback on the Wii’s success for gesture-based games.

3. Saw the Qode booth from NeoMedia. This is a 2-D barcode system where users can “scan” the barcode with the cameras on the phones and receive whatever information is linked to the code. This is basically what my startup Gridtag was trying to do, but we had a much cooler coding system. Anyway, it’s nice to see this type of product, which is very popular in Japan, start appearing in the U.S. Or least have a booth at CTIA.

4. I played around with the new Upstage phone from Samsung available with Sprint. One side of the handset is a phone, with typical phone buttons. Flip it over and on the other side, it’s a music player with typical music player controls. It’s a neat idea and very impressive that that crammed all of that into something so small. It’s got pretty poor battery life, so it comes with a battery wallet that extends the life and actually isn’t very bulky at all. It was a bit annoying to have tiny screen on the phone side, but not as bad as I would have thought. After all, this takes us back 10 years as far as screen size is concerned. But it turns out that the larger screens aren’t so useful for phone functions. It’s there for content. And that’s what the flip side is for.