The CTIA Wireless show kicked off in Las Vegas this week with a new Windows Mobile, an iPhone-style handset from Samsung and a surprise announcement of galactic proportions.

It's been a big year already for greater openness in mobile. So big that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin thinks his agency's done enough for now. He said he'd be circulating an order to his fellow commissioners to dismiss a Skype petition asking for any application or phone to be allowed on mobile networks. The so-called Carterphone petition was inspired by a 1968 ruling about the traditional phone system.

Microsoft's Robbie Bach unveiled Windows Mobile 6.1 in a keynote address to the annual get-together on Tuesday morning. The update has a new home screen that can be personalized letting you cut and paste text from one application to another like you can on the PC. In one of many nods to Apple's popular iPhone, 6.1 also has a full HTML browser. But it goes one better than the iPhone with support for Flash, which means you can watch YouTube videos on YouTube itself.

Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse (Hess-eeee) gave a glimpse of the slick new Instinct phone from Samsung. It has a touchscreen like the iPhone, but also includes GPS. It'll run on Sprint's EV-DO network, which is a fair bit faster than AT&T's EDGE system that the iPhone relies on. No word on how much it'll cost, but it's coming out in June.

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson was on hand for some April Fool's trickery. He announced that Virgin and Google were partnering to populate Mars. The team would create a Noah's Ark type ship to carry people, seeds, and animals to the red planet. At the end of his speech, he asked willing volunteers for the one-way trip to join him on stage.

For the IDG News Service I'm Nick Barber in Boston with reporting from Stephen Lawson and Nancy Gohring in Las Vegas.