LG

This is the week of the Internationale Funkausstellung (er, International Consumer Electronics Show) in Berlin, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. It's one whopping, European CES. The trouble with IFA for us on the State-side, though, is that a lot of companies forget one key thing: the magical Internet can cross water. Because of that, a lot of "new product announcements" are "things we have already seen," so it takes a little more effort (and flexing what's left of my undergrad German skillz) to figure out what's worth paying attention to.

Over the last two days, the IFA press preview has kicked up some real goodies -- even before the show floor opens to the public today. IFA '09 has already shown us a real taste of how our home theaters will look in the next half-decade, laptops on serious diets, and a couple cool new toys.

The best chocolate comes from Europe. Go on, try and argue with me. Now, look at the new non-U.S. Black Label Series LG Chocolate BL40 and try and argue with me again. Can't do it, can you? Thought so. Shielded in tempered glass, the premium phone has a 4-inch, 800-by-345-pixel LCD widescreen. Its 21:9 aspect ratio is wide enough to display full 70mm movies across the entire screen. Yum.

How could a technology be failing if it performs better and costs less than its competitor? That's probably what plasma TV makers keep asking themselves, and one we're been thinking about since both Pioneer and Vizio pulled out of the business last month. So we asked a few folks in the biz for their thoughts.

Its hard enough getting digital TV from an antenna in your house. Forget about in a car. But Samsung and LG aim to change that. In a scary reminiscence of Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, the two companies had been developing similar but incompatible standards (called AVS-B and MPH) for digital TV that can be delivered on the road.

We all expect the cellphone to get smaller while packing in an ever broadening array of functions. The real question is what it’ll look like—inside and outin several years. To find the answer, we investigated dozens of on-the-brink technologies, picking the brains of cellphone product engineers, industry analysts and lab researchers. They told us of cameras that zoom, screens that play Star Wars, and micro fuel cells that deliver days of continuous operation.

� Samsung's SlimFit HDTV� LG's Direct-View Slim CRT HDTV