CTIA Wireless 2009 has drawn to an anticlimactic close today, concluding one of the less memorable, less action-packed CTIAs in recent memory. Friday was as much about skedaddlin’ out of town as quickly as possible as it was about making news and launching new products for exhibitors, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t unearth a few gems for you. No need to thank us, seriously — click on! Wistron’s Snapdragon-powered PurseBook gets demoed NVIDIA is showing that wacky Mini 1000 / Tegra mashup at CTIA, but Qualcomm’s not far behind with its own creative ways to repurpose smartphone silicon into MID and netbook-class devices.

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CTIA Roundup, Day Three

After a rocky, if not comical launch , Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10 is now shuffling out in full force to legions of soon-to-be netbook owners. For those of you who already bought in — via QVC or the more traditional street corner vendor model — we’re wondering what you’d do differently if magically given a mythical Do Over token. Would you simply offer up the options (TV tuner, for one) promised during the machine’s announcement

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How would you change Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10?

Yeah, usually our featured images are photos, but Alex Broeckel ’s photorealistic rendering—of that all-too-likely scenario that we will soon battle giant robo-octopuses using the power of steam—well, it just made horrifying, paranoia-inducing sense.

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Cyberoctopus Attacked by Steamships [Art]

NVIDIA is showing that wacky Mini 1000 / Tegra mashup at CTIA , but Qualcomm’s not far behind with its own creative ways to repurpose smartphone silicon into MID and netbook-class devices. Making an appearance at Qualcomm’s booth was a prototype PurseBook from Taiwan’s Wistron, which stuffs a Snapdragon chipset into a device looking (and weighing) a little bit like a VAIO P .

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Wistron’s Snapdragon-powered PurseBook gets demoed

If nothing else, this custom Team Fortress 2 map is pure eye candy, for Mario Kart fans at least. Not only does it look like a giant Mario Kart track, this map even has items from popular manga series like Akira (Kaneda’s bike). Video after the break — background music courtesy of OC Remix .

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Team Fortress 2 Played On a Mario Kart Track

I love the idea of light-up HDMI cables but I’m not sold on these, from Japan’s Donya electronics retailer . In a sense, they are completely backwards . Have you guessed why?

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Light-Up HDMI Cables Make Sense, But Not Like This [Home Theater]

In this incredible video, you’ll see “ultra slow motion cameras capturing Schweppervescence at 10,000 frames per second.” Fortunately, this is something you can recreate at home with the Casio EX-F1 . Continue reading to watch. [via Toxel ]

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Incredible Video Shows Water in Slow Motion

We couldn’t get the thing to turn on — prototype buffoonery, zapped battery, or a classic case of trade show jitters, we figure — but Inventec’s curious V112 was on display inside Qualcomm’s booth at CTIA . Why Qualcomm, you ask? Well, Qualcomm owns Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, which has been pushing its mirasol display tech for several years now; the main draw is that it’s super high-contrast which eliminates the need for a backlight in many situations where a traditional LCD would need a little help, and the WinMo-powered V112 uses a small mirasol strip as a secondary display surrounded by nav controls. Even though we weren’t getting any Windows Mobile action, we did manage to engage the mirasol display (also known as “the cool part”) where we saw an example of what the V112 might be able to do without turning on the battery-destroying LCD up top: show basic status information and the current time. It’s a good idea; we’re not sure that the V112’s implementation is perfect since there’s zero tactility to the d-pad, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and mirasol could use as many commercial implementations as it can get.

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Inventec’s mirasol-equipped V112 smartphone goes on display

Facebook is testing a new virtual gifts product that allows users to give “credits” to other users. The idea is that you can give other users these credits in addition to or in lieu of commenting or liking a message or status. So if for example I say “out walking the dog,” other people can throw some credits my way. VentureBeat has an exclusive overview.

Here’s why Facebook likes the product – you pay for the credits with cash, to the tune of $1 per 100 credits. That’s enough incentive for them to test this out, despite the fact that anyone who looks at it for more than a moment will realize it’s doomed to fail. There’s no real world parallel to this gift, like Facebook’s existing (and reportedly underperforming) virtual gifts product that lets you give someone an image of a cupcake or whatever on their birthday. My strong guess is very few people will use this, I can’t imagine someone saying “nice status update, here’s some fake money.”

But it’s another weapon that the giant will use to try to eke out a profit during these tough financial times. And it’s far better than having to return to the capital markets to raise money at what’s likely to be an embarrassing large discount from that ridiculous $15 billion valuation that Microsoft gave them in 2007. Maybe if enough users buy credits that can never be redeemed back for cash they can stretch their runway a little farther.

It’s been a rough week for the fast growing network. They fired Gideon Yu, their third CFO in less than two years, on Tuesday. Facebook’s PR group flat out lied to the world about it, telling everyone who’d listen that the reason was they wanted to go public and they needed a CFO with public company experience. In rushing to get the message out they failed to note that Yu already had public company experience, at both Yahoo and Google, and is one of the more respected CFO’s in Silicon Valley. All Facebook succeeded in doing was to cement their reputation as an organization that will say anything they like, damn the truth, even going so far as to unfairly trash their own employees. Not much backbone there, and it’s no surprise that they can’t hold on to executives. Any future candidate worth their salt would do well to think twice before joining.

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Facebook’s Newest Funding Source: You

Mooch is a new video game trading site looking to help users trade games directly with each other, allowing them to bypass middleman stores like GameStop and save money in the process. Depending on how new and popular the games being traded are, members can expect to save as much as $30 per trade, and simply have to mail their games to each other after establishing a trade on the site.

Mooch uses an automated system to calculate the value of each game, taking into account factors including its lowest price on Amazon, how old it is, and how popular it as. Each game is assigned a point value (new games seem to be around 200-300 points each), and to trade for a game you need to offer something of the same value, or buy more points to match it. If you come up short you can buy extra points, but they don’t come cheap – they’re around $15 for 100, but the purpose of the service is to encourage trading games, not buying them through a roundabout method.

At this point the market is nearly empty, and won’t become very useful until it can attract a sizable number of users (it’s the classic chicken-and-the-egg problem). To entice users, Mooch is totally free to use during its beta period, with plans to shift to a $20 annual subscription model later on.

The industry may hate it, but video game trading isn’t something that’s going away soon – at least until game downloads with DRM become the norm. And stores like GameStop (and more recently, Amazon) don’t really offer much value to gamers that frequently trade their games, often exchanging games for significantly less than their true market value. Mooch saves users money, but it also comes with its own problems. For one, you have to rely on other members to ship your game promptly, and there’s always the fear that they may never do it at all (though Mooch does appear to guarantee trades, promising to refund with Mooch points should one go awry).

Mooch isn’t the first player in this space, either. SwapTree supports video games, and other sites like the now-defunct PeerFlix and the old Lala tried to swapping models for other forms of media without much success.

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Mooch Takes Aim At GameStop With Video Game Swapping Market