The annual Consumer Electronics Show - CES, as it as best known - is a festival of all things electronic: the place where the industry shows retail buyers, distributors, and journalists all things new for the coming year. Trade associations from Europe and the Pacific Rim show off the talents of their local companies, hoping to land new business. Home robotics, new wireless technologies, seemingly miles of flat-screens of all sizes and technological families abound.

This year, as it has for the past several years, the show filled the city's two major convention centers, almost all the hotel exhibition spaces and ballrooms, and most of the hotel rooms in Las Vegas. More than 2,700 companies participated, filling more than 1.8 million square feet of exhibits.

But given all that, to my mind this was not a show of astounding breakthroughs but an extension and advancement of what we've begun to see. Some standout products and some growing trends are worth mentioning, however.

Products

(Disclaimer: I haven't had time to use any of these in-depth yet, so these are just first impressions. Don't buy just because they caught my eye.)

• The ZOOM H2 Handy Recorder. This appropriately named device is like a whole recording studio that fits in your pocket. It sports four miniature microphones in a single housing that record down to two separate audio tracks. It records directly to an SD RAM card, can convert between several types of audio files, and even has a guitar tuner built in to get you ready to rock. It can record an individual, one-to-one interview or a whole band in a room. It's about the size of two decks of cards. Very cool.
• BUGbase and BUGmodules. This is a dream come true for techies who've always wanted to build their own devices. The BUGbase is a small computer that runs the Linux operating system. The current BUGmodules include a GPS antenna, a digital camera that takes video and stills, a color touch screen, and a combination motion sensor and accelerometer (the devices that let the WII remotes work their magic). The idea is that you can slap these modules onto the base and build the portable device of your dreams. More plug-in modules are planned.
• mint. This is a web-based personal finance manager with a difference. It's free and looks very powerful. It pays for itself by offering you advice and opportunities to enroll in different financial packages based on your activity. For example, it might look at what you are paying for your car insurance and point you to policies that could save you money. This probably gives those concerned with privacy the heebie-jeebies. On the other hand, how many of the on-line banking systems use your Social Security number as a password?

Trends

(My content everywhere, in and out of the home.)

• Hand-held video projection. Not a product yet, but a technology from 3M that shows real promise. Imagine being able to project a 50-inch diagonal image or larger from your cell phone or personal media device. All you road warriors who slog from place to place with your laptops and digital projectors, this could make your lives much easier.
• Interfaces. Also not ready for prime time, but cool, was Gesture-Tek's new video-camera interface for gesture-based interaction. This kind of interaction was shown in the movie "Minority Report" several years ago; Tom Cruise searched, edited, and zoomed into video files on a big screen by moving his arms and hands in different ways - kind of like using sign language for devices. There's a lot of potential here for easy-to-use interfaces to televisions, game systems, and even car navigation. It's been done before, but the level of quality and control shown in this demo made it look like the technology is coming much closer. The demonstrations of games and screen controls were very solid and worked well. This could become the remote control you cannot lose.

Access

There were previews of two new offerings in access for the hearing-impaired: a product and a service. The product is a portable video sign-language service coming from a deaf-owned and operated company called Viable. For the past several years, the deaf community has benefited from dedicated videophone-style services that allow them to call each other in sign language or connect with an interpreting service through sign instead of text telephony. These systems are generally confined to a single room of the house and cannot be used on the road. Viable aims to fix all that and has its product in beta testing right now with the hopes of having a shipping product in the third or fourth quarter of this year.

The service is a kind of "closed-captioned radio" developed by NPR, Harris Corp, and Towson University in Maryland. The concept aired at the show utilizes part of the HD radio signal to send the textural information. When it is implemented, users will have to register for a code to be sent to their radios that will "unlock" the text displayed.

There was, of course, much more at CES. Based on this trip, I'll likely be collecting a lot of new products for review and the best (or in some cases, worst) of those will likely appear in this space during the coming year.