It was the week Nortel sought bankruptcy protection and Steve Jobs sought an extended medical break.
Succumbing to the inevitable, Nortel filed for Chapter 11 protection despite enough cash to cover its debts for another two years. The filing does not cover its Asian operations.
Nortel's Metro Ethernet group attracted the serious interest of Huawei in September, but security fears from US government customers scuttled the deal.
Sony faces a $1.1 billion deficit - its first loss in 14 years.
Motorola cut another 4,000 staff, or more than 5% of its workforce, including 3,000 in its handset division. Google axed 100 recruitment staff, a number of contractors, and several unpopular web-based services.
Steve Jobs is taking a six-month break from Apple, leaving COO Tim Cook in charge. Jobs said his health problems were more serious than he previously thought.
Yahoo's stock price fell 2% after it announced Autodesk chief Carol Bartz as its new CEO.
A China Mobile exec warned foreign handset-makers they would lose 2G business from the carrier if they didn't put more into TD-SCDMA.
The carrier will invest $8.6 billion on rolling out its TD network this year and another $1.5 billion on handset subsidies.
Dell is plotting to enter the smartphone market, analysts say, predicting an announcement as early as the Barcelona event next month.
Hong Kong's spectrum auction raised $110 million in the first four days.
UAE telco Etisalat and partner Taameen Telecom paid EUR300 million to obtain Iran's third mobile license.
Australia's ACMA filed its first case against SMS spam, alleging three firms tried to entice users into calling premium numbers charged at A$5 a minute.
An ACMA report said 55% of telemarketing complaints arose from calls promoting telecom services. US privacy activists called on the Federal Trade Commission to launch an inquiry into mobile advertising practices.
Wi-Fi chip sales rose 25% and the number of Wi-Fi enabled handsets leaped 52% in
2008. Intel chairman Craig Barrett expressed confidence in Wimax's prospects, but also called for "seamless integration" with 4G. Intel Capital and two other firms kicked $11 million into OSS firm Tribold.
A study by 49 US attorneys-general concluded that online bullying of children was a much bigger problem than sexual "grooming" or propositioning of minors.
Police found a nine-year-old girl allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother using a mobile phone signal and Google Street View.
And an American teenager sent 14,528 text messages last month - an average one every two minutes each waking hour on her all-you-can-eat mobile account.