Every time you turn around nowadays there's another huge tech trade show, at which a bunch of new phones and tablets are announced.

Here's a sample of the cool new gadgets surfacing at the CTIA wireless conference this week in Orlando. Some of the devices were already announced, and some still don't have prices and specific ship dates yet.

Sprint was the first to offer a 4G phone in the U.S., and now it's offering a 4G phones with glasses-free 3D displays, available 2U this summer for a price to be announced later. It's an Android-based device built by HTC, with the "Sense" interface designed in Pioneer Square.

The HTC Evo 3D has a 4.3-inch, 960 by 540 pixel 3D display. Inside it has dual-core 1.2 gigahertz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 4 gigabytes of internal memory and 1 gig of RAM. It functions as a 3G/4G hotspot supporting up to eight devices at once over WiFi and outputs 720p video via HDMI. On the back it has dual 5 megapixel cameras for taking 3D images and videos.

Sprint's also going to sell a tablet-sized version of the device, called the HTC Evo View 4G. It has a 7-inch diagonal, 1024 by 600 pixel touchscreen (without 3D). The tablet runs on a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon dual-core processor with 32 gigs of internal memor and 1 gig of RAM. It also uses HTC's "Scribe" system for input with a digital pen and works as a hotspot.

Yesterday, Sprint announced that it's also going to sell Google's new flagship Android device, the Nexus S 4G. The Samsung phone has a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, 1 GHz processor, a dedicated graphics processing unit and Android version 2.3 ("Gingerbread"). Sprint and Google also said they're connecting Google Voice, so Sprint customers can use their phone number with Google's calling service. The phone's coming this spring.

AT&T yesterday announced that it's also selling a glasses-free 3D phone, the LG Thrill 4G, with a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core 1 GHz processor and Android version 2.2. The Thrill comes with 16 gigs of memory - 8 onboard plus an 8 gig memory card - and records 3D video at 720p and 2D video at 1080p. It also plays back high-def video thorugh an HDMI port or streams it to DLNA devices.

AT&T's also going to sell a version of the Windows-based HTC HD7, which it's calling the HD7S. It's going to use the HSPA+ network and have the updated software with cut-and-paste when it's released in a few weeks.

T-Mobile also introduced several new phones, including the "G2x with Google by LG," or the G2x for short. It's based on a dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 processor and Android 2.2. There's also an 8 megapixel camera that takes 1080p video and front-facing 1.3 megapixel chatcam.

T-Mobile announced that it's boosting the maximum speed of its HSPA+ network in a handful of markets - Las Vegas, Orlando and New York - to 42 megabits per second. To get those speeds, you'll need a new device, though - namely the "Rocket" stick modems announced at the show:

The Bellevue-based company also introduced a "value" smartphone, the Nokia Astound, that will cost $80 (after a $50 rebate) when it goes on sale April 6. It has a 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen, free turn-by-turn navigation and an 8 megapixel camera that takes 720p video. The Astound is based on Nokia's Symbian operating system that's going to be displaced starting next year by Windows.

The U.S. Department of Justice this afternoon sued six high-profile tech companies for making anticompetitive moves to protect employees from poaching.

Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar and Intuit made agreements "that restrained competition between them for highly skilled employees," the department said in a news release.

They agreed not to cold-call each other's employees, which "distorted the competitive process," Molly Boast, deputy attorney general in the antitrust division said.

Starting as early as 2005, the companies agreed to create "do not call lists" of each other's employees and lists of companies that were "off limits" for recruiting.

An example listed in the release:

Beginning no later than September 2007, Google and Intel executives agreed not to cold call each other's employees. In its hiring policies and protocol manual, Google listed Intel among the companies that have special agreements with Google and are part of the "Do Not Cold Call" list. Similarly, Intel instructed its human resources staff about the existence of the agreement.

The companies were named in a civil antitrust complaint filed today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Simultaneously, a proposed five-year settlement was filed that would end the suit.

From the release:

Although the complaint alleges only that the companies agreed to ban cold calling, the proposed settlement more broadly prohibits the companies from entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees. The companies will also implement compliance measures tailored to these practices.

The suit came out of a larger, ongoing investigation into high-tech firms' employment practices.

Google acknowledged the settlement with a blog post, in which Amy Lambert, associate general counsel, still defended the company's behavior. An excerpt:

In order to maintain a good working relationship with these companies, in 2005 we decided not to "cold call" employees at a few of our partner companies. Our policy only impacted cold calling, and we continued to recruit from these companies through LinkedIn, job fairs, employee referrals, or when candidates approached Google directly. In fact, we hired hundreds of employees from the companies involved during this time period.

Seattle video startup Delve Networks is jumping onto WebM, a new Web video standard announced today by Google, Mozilla and others.

WebM is intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to commercial video standards -- namely the H.264 codec that's widely used for Web video today and favored by Apple.

Microsoft said its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser will support WebM's "VP8" video codec, as will Mozilla's Firefox, Opera and Google's Chrome browser.

The jumble of video standards and jousting between platform companies is confusing to consumers but good for companies like Delve.

After a few different approaches to the video market, Delve has a growing business converting Web publishers' video to multiple standards for different devices. today it jumped on the WebM bandwagon, announcing its support of the standard.

In an interview, Chief Executive Alex Castro, a veteran of Microsoft and Amazon.com, also offered some insights on WebM and what's happening with Web video standards.

Castro is enthusiastic about WebM but expects it will take awhile to get established.

"It's sort of like HTML 5 -- it's not going to change the world in the next six months, but in 18 months it could have a big effect," he said.

Castro said "Adobe stands to be the biggest loser" although Adobe is among the initial companies supporting the WebM project.

With "the combination of this new WebM format along with a lot of people getting behind HTML 5, you start to say, 'Why do I care about Flash and Silverlight?' " he said.

Castro said the complexity of the situation helps Delve, which has also benefited from the format spat between Apple and Adobe. The fight has generated business with publishers needing their video converted to play on the iPad.

"The only way you can play video on the iPad is to support HTML5 and H.264," he explained. "Our customers ... they don't care about the standard politics, they care about 'can my customers watch my content.'"

How will consumers be affected by the video standards battles?

"Unfortunately in the near term there's going to be some confusion for users and some poor experiences," Castro predicted.

"I think unfortunately consumers are caught in the middle as all these major technology vendors are vying for the highest ground," he said. "Right now consumers are getting the shortest end of the stick. If I spend $500 or $700 for an iPad, it kind of sucks a lot of Web sites I go to don't have support for HTML5."

Does Google have enough clout to establish the WebM standard?

"They have YouTube and that's great, but what they don't have is enough browser market share to do it by themselves," he said. "That's why they need Opera and Mozilla, but even if you add those guys up they don't have 50 percent market share. In some ways it would be good for consumers today if Google had the oomph to make this a standard. As soon as someone wins, the sooner consumers aren't caught in the middle."

"I think the sad reality here is this is probably going to play out for another year or two while these guys jockey for position."

Meanwhile, Delve's doing fine, Castro said. He said its sales grew 400 percent last year -- to more than $1 million -- and he's expecting around 290 percent sales growth this year.

Lots of companies start out offering free products on the Web and then move to premium, paid versions.

Seattle's Tableau Software is going the other direction. After building a strong business selling data visualization tools to corporations, government agencies and non-profit organizations, Tableau decided to give away a free version for use on the Web.

The software, available today at Tableaupublic.com, is a set of tools for building interactive graphics based on spreadsheet data. Interactivity depends on the features added, but these are the types of graphics that dynamically change as you click to analyze and explore the data.

Graphics built with Tableau Public can be embedded into blogs and Web sites and shared online. Also made available are the underlying sets of data; if users want to restrict use of the graphics or the data they'll have to upgrade to paid versions of Tableau that start at $1,000.

Chief Executive Christian Chabot hopes that Tableau's free tools will help data become a "first class citizen" on the Web, similar to the way tools such as YouTube advanced online video.

"Data on the Web is like video in 1997," he said.

Chabot, 38, co-founded Tableau after its tools were initially developed with Defense Department funding at Stanford University. The Fremont-based company moved to Seattle in 2003 and now employs 105.

Sales grew 55 percent last year to more than $20 million. Chabot expects to hire another 50 people this year and offer shares in the company in three to five years.

"Our plan is to take it public and employ thousands of people in Seattle,'' he said.

In the meantime, Chabot's hoping Tableau's free tools will raise awareness of its products and help people better understand data.

Sharing a free version online was encouraged by Adobe co-founder Chuck Geschke, who joined Tableau's board in 2007, Chabot said.

Chabot is especially enthusiastic about seeing Tableau Public used to analyze data the federal government is increasingly sharing through new transparency initiatives.

"It is for the public at large to use with public information for the public good,'' he said.

Here's a Tableau Public graphic that Chabot built using TechCrunch data to show where VC's funded companies in 2009. You can explore the graphic and change the display by clicking on the various modules:

As part of a road trip pitching its new AIR -- Adobe Integrated Runtime -- the software company's offering free beer and tutorials in a big red bus outside of Elysian Fields.

The mobile developer conference begins a 9:15 a.m. on Tuesday and runs into the evening.

If that's too early for an Immortal IPA, the company's also pouring Red Bull and coffee.

Finally, mainstream applications are starting to really take advantage of multicore processors to speed things up.

Adobe's Bob Donlon explained in a blog entry how the company's doing this with its new (Seattle-born) After Effects CS3, and drops a little hint about the next high-end Macs:

"If you've got a multiprocessor and/or multi-core system, After Effects farms out each frame of your comp to each processor, so it can RAM Preview and Render multiple frames simultaneously. You will need 512MB RAM for each process, since After Effects will actually launch background processes to run on your multiple processors, but as long as you've got enough RAM you can render 2 frames at a time on a 2-core system, 4 at time on a dual/dual , 8 at a time on some of the new high end Windows machines (and the 8-core Macs that we expect to see any day now)."

Adobe loyalists may decline the offers out of loyalty, but if I were a curious Web designer, I'd be downloading the trial samples of Microsoft's new Expression Web design tools and the test preview of its "WPF/E" version of Windows Presentation Foundation.

Expression Web and Expression Media are now on sale. Expression Web is a tool for designing sites, and Expression Media is a tool for managing digital assets.

Coming next quarter are Expression Design, an illustration tool, and Expression Blend, a tool for creating Web applications based on the new .Net Framework 3.0.

WPF/E is much more than Microsoft's worst code name. Scott Guthrie, general manager of the development team, on his blog described it as "a small client runtime that enables AJAX developers and designers to deliver richer, cross-platform, interactive web experiences. It will allow applications to go beyond what can be done with pure HTML today, and will enable sites to significantly improve the client user experience by blending HTML UI, Dynamic Vector Graphics, Animation and Media into a seamless cross-platform browser experience."

It's also available for both Windows and Macs, even PowerPC Macs.

ADBE was up 51 cents, to $37.51, after the announcement of its new Acrobat 8 line and Connect, an online service that lets users videoconference while working together on PDF documents.

Goldman Sachs said the announcement "signals the start of Adobe's long awaited product cycle" and investors should be confident that shares "can continue to rise" heading toward the even bigger launch of Adobe's new Creative Suite early next year.

I haven't had much time with the products, but I was given a quick demo this afternoon, via Connect.

Acrobat has a more streamlined look, with fewer buttons facing the user. Connect seems nifty and it's available free until the end of the year, when it will start costing $39 a month.

Adobe doesn't seem too worried about competition from Microsoft, which is offering add-in PDF support to Office and creating a competing document format known as XPS.

The PDF support "is a good thing for PDF and Adobe,'' Tom Hale, vice president of Adobe's knowledge worker business unit, told me. He said it helps to have more people using the format.

As for Microsoft's new document format, Hale said "XPS is aiming at where PDF was 10 years ago."

Adobe's Seattle office made some prominent contributions to the new products, he said, including the control in Connect to start a meeting and its hosted meeting service.