I’m happy to announce that, for the first time, we’ll be at CES. Does that mean we won’t be at Macworld Expo? Nope… we’re going to cover both.

As you may know, CES and Macworld often overlap… in fact, they almost always overlap. Well, thanks to the amazing growth of PhoneNews.com (thanks to you, by the way), we’re going to cover Macworld in San Francisco… and then head straight for Las Vegas to cover CES.

And, you can be sure that 2009 will be big for all of us, as we’ll be covering more shows, events, movers, and shakers than ever before.

A quick update to the forums will be deployed shortly, probably over the next 48 hours. That should address the spam attacks which the forum has been under for the past day or so.

The speed update has finally taken effect. If you’re on a very fast internet connection (greater than eight megabits), you should notice dramatically improved speeds. Enjoy, and post back if you feel like it with some speed results!

We’ve updated the Phone Encyclopedia with a couple of security updates from the core MediaWiki platform. We’ve also updated a few bits of WordPress code and made some under-the-hood changes.

Finally, a permissions glitch cropped up that caused some images to not load properly.

If nothing has changed, that means everything’s working great. If you see something out of order, post a comment.

We are aware of a few outdated links that have been reported (mostly on older articles). We’ll be getting to those over the next couple of days.

We realize that bandwidth in America is just starting to take off. With fiber finally getting off the ground, DOCSIS 3.0 arriving next year, and even ADSL2+… it’s time to make things even faster.

So, we’re filling the switches right now to boost our bandwidth speed. We’re now able to push at least 20 megabits per connection. That means you get your news faster… and that’s what we’re here to do every day.

Because there’s going to be even more activity associated with MechaWorks in the coming weeks… we may also be adding more servers. But, for now, we’ve just re-tooled out network configuration to get an extra burst of speed. Special thanks to the folks at RapidVPS for the amazing response time to help us get this done.

Update: Hang on folks, the speed boost hasn’t kicked in just yet. We’re working on it.

One “genius” splogger decided to start stealing dozens of articles from PhoneNews.com, and putting them on his web site. Worse, he actually has his photo online:

If you see this guy, feel free to say “hello” from all of us. In the mean time, we’re serving the search engines with DMCA notices… which will shut him off from both search engines, and from his junk advertising.

As you may have read, in past articles we noted (in multiple articles) that Verizon was going with QChat-style technology for its Push To Talk platform. We did note that a refreshed BREWChat was a possibility. Of course, since then it has come clear that Verizon is using Motorola’s new PTT platform.

We didn’t clear the air on that, so now we will.

Essentially, Motorola was able to come up with their answer to QChat… by reverse engineering QChat. Motorola was hand-picked by Sprint Nextel to have first-look at QChat technology. And, with the iDEN team being the world experts on cellular PTT… reverse engineering QChat wasn’t so hard.

That is why there is so much confusion, and no, we really couldn’t piece the puzzle together before it all launched. Granted, we probably could have fingered Motorola sooner, but we wanted to give as accurate a picture as possible.

So, yes, Verizon is using technology stolen based on QChat. It was just that Motorola put it together, and reverse-engineered it.

This also puts Motorola in a powerful position. As being backers of both LTE and WiMAX… Motorola now has PTT expertise that they can put to use in both platforms. And, the Harmony (iDEN) team can rest assured, knowing that’s very good job security.

We just finished the paperwork, and tomorrow we’ll start reviewing a game-changing device. While we aren’t allowed to say just yet which phone it is… there aren’t that many to chose from. Regardless, stay tuned next week for a full review of it.

And no, that won’t be the only review, we have quite a few coming out shortly…

As you may have been able to tell from the sluggish news this week, it has not been a good week for PhoneNews.com. Our (forced) perpetual moving, combined with my (forced) absence this week… has shown some of our weaknesses.

On top of everything else, I’ve encountered serious networking issues that occurred just after getting back to the office. So, we’re now offline basically. (Update: That problem was traced to our FiOS provider, SureWest, having a Remote Terminal update which mucked up wireless on the 5.8 GHz band… still, it’s just case in point of the muck we’ve been dealing with this week…)

Here’s what we’re doing about it. Effective right now, I have turned the phones off, I have turned the outside world off. Nothing will happen until I personally address each and every factor that we have identified this week… and I really don’t care what happens because of it.

We’re committed to being better, we are committed to being your first choice for wireless news. We’re going to bring on more staff, more redundancy, and more systems to make this site work better. And, until that happens, all you’ll see from us, is all the news we skipped over this week. So, please, stay tuned, you’ll see a lot more real soon.

I know that I said I would be back around Monday. Well, that didn’t happen.

Our new office has a few problems… gas and air conditioning both failed over the weekend. But, the real failures started Monday. First, our Linksys WRT350N failed. Then, I managed to brick my iPhone 3G (no, I wasn’t hacking it, simply powercycled it… and it now hangs at the Apple logo).

Long story short, when it rains, it pours. I’ll be back later this week, probably late Wednesday or Thursday.