CES

Though always known for its odd, over-the-top exhibits, CES took the cake this year by featuring a full TV sound studio--inside Sony's already-massive booth. The studio featured the brand-new set design for Jeopardy, the nerd television institution owned by Sony Pictures that was celebrating its 25th season by filming its "Celebrity Jeopardy!" and "Tournament of Champions" editions, which began airing last week.

That gave us a chance at CES to meet up with geek-god Alex Trebek (who just gets better-looking every year) to talk about TV, tech, and trivia. Trebek claims to be a technology dinosaur, saying he doesn't even know what model cellphone he carries. But we weren't buying it. The guy's been working in electronic television since the age of the dinosaurs-well actually, 1961, when he started at the Canadian Broadcasting Company. But he remains a master of the medium-dreaming of how his show will look on OLED sets and in 3D.

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The Samsung W7900, aka the Show, certainly lives up to its name. In fact, if it had just the gorgeous 3.2-inch OLED screen, the digital TV tuner or the five-megapixel camera, it would be a winner. But the Show combines all those features with the (current) Holy Grail of handhelds -- a digital projector that displays sharp, bright images up to 50 inches.

Our friends at Texas Instruments, which makes the DLP projector inside the Show, let us snag the phone for a quick hands-on.

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"Small" is still far from the right word for the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. But by every measure—both official and anecdotal--it was a slimmer event than in years past. In overall terms, attendance was down by at least 12,000, and probably a good deal more. Last year's official tally was approximately 141,000 visitors. Sources inside CEA say that this year's was well under the 130,000 that had been projected.

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Amidst this week's CES buzz, there’s one political question that keeps popping up on show-goers' lips: “Why should Obama have to give up his Blackberry?”

The president-elect will soon become the most tech-savvy commander-in-chief in American history, and the digital communication landscape has changed radically since Bush first entered the White House in 2000. Today, it’s almost unthinkable that any chief executive, corporate or political, should be required to use less technology than he or she did prior to taking office.

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Just as production of Polaroid's beloved instant film grinds to a halt, the company is announcing the anticipated digital version of the original "instant camera". Debuting in spring 2009 for $199.99, the PoGo Instant Digital Camera combines Polaroid's 2008 breakthrough pocket printer with a digital camera.

The earliest photos in my family albums are all old-school Polaroid, and I have fond memories of watching images of birthday parties and impromptu portraits emerge on the film. So my first thought about the PoGo was: can a digital camera possibly capture this mysterious magic?

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OQO has been pushing the bounds of what you can fit into your palm for a few years. Long before netbooks were even a twinkle in Intel's eye, the company was making tiny, full-service computers. But with the explosion of said netbooks, plus ever-smarter smartphones, is there still a place for this Lilliputian, high-power, high-priced computer? Hard to say, but the company isn't just sitting back to see what happens.

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Two days before the Consumer Electronics Show officially starts, the first products debuted at CES Unveiled on Tuesday evening. Many of the tables at the Venetian conference center in Vegas looked best-suited to an obscure trade fair, with information about USB and HDMI specifications, for example. But a few innovative--or just plain quirky -- products emerged. Click to see the highlights.

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At long last -- and after we jealously watched Sharp's debut in Japan last year -- wireless high-def TVs have come to the States. LG's 55-inch LHX LCD television features a separate "media box" that sources like cable boxes and Blu-ray players plug into. (Other products from Sony and Geffen are add-on units.) The box beams digital video and audio to the one-inch-thick TV using 60-gigahertz technology from SiBeam called WirelessHD.

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