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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 promise of OLED technology is that, unlike its inorganic counterpart, it can be used to create flexible and nearly transparent ultra-thin screens, opening up myriad possibilities for what we can do with displays and lighting.

Samsung has come up with the flashiest anti-counterfeiting tech we've seen yet: forget boring old RFID chips--the AMOLED e-passport concept looks has a 2-inch, paper-thin, QVGA-resolution flexible display embedded in the photo slot, which shows a rotating 360° view of your head when held up to an RFID reader.

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.

Every year, television innovations make up the backbone of every major consumer-electronics player's booth. And for good reason—we've been buying televisions for well over 50 years now, with no sign of slowing anytime soon. Try saying that about any of the other product families at CES—personal computers are practically infants in comparison.

This year, the race for the biggest picture is as heated as always, although the parade of massive, mini-Jumbotrons are now sharing the spotlight with razor-thin OLED sets.

Sleek, wall-mounted plasma screens might seem like viewing nirvana now, but what if a picture window could double as a flat-screen TV? Or what if your car´s GPS system could be displayed on your windshield? Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have invented a transparent OLED (organic light-emitting diode) that will allow just that, transforming any clear surface into a see-through display.