Last week, PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan pointed out something unusual about former Vice President Al Gore’s keynote speech at next week’s CTIA Wireless phone trade show in Las Vegas: It wasn’t going to be open to the press, apparently at the request of Gore or his staff. It was a truly jarring bit of news. I’ve been attending tech trade shows for a couple of decades, and can’t remember a single other keynote that the media wasn’t invited to attend.

But it’s not just as a courtesy that we press people are normally let into such speeches–media coverage is one of the primary reasons why they exist. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine a scenario in which Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld Expo or Bill Gates ones at CES were anything but publicity extravaganzas designed to attract as much media attention as possible.

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Carriers have long worried that they’ll be relegated to being “dumb pipes” as more developers churn out applications for mobile phones. But some new figures are now making those carriers change their stance, as we heard during today’s keynote debate on “Open Networks” at the CTIA conference happening in San Francisco this week.

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After wandering around at CTIA (usually hopelessly lost) I’ve decided that I was wrong. I need a touch screen and I need it bad. When the iPhone came out, the EDGE network, crappy AT&T coverage in Austin and the hype factor kept me away. Plus, the touch screen on my husband’s Treo had always flustered me. I liked the tactile element of hitting keys.

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