I'm here in Las Vegas for CES 2008 -- the annual Consumer Electronics Show.
CES is just huge -- it opened this week with some 140,000 people checking out 2,900 exhibitors, 200 conference sessions, and a profusion of associated activities throughout Vegas.
I'll leave the instant live blogging to the teams from Engadget and Gizmodo -- with visual booth tours and hands-on product reports. These blogs have deployed with military planning, including some ten bloggers, logistical traffic managers to coordinate assignments, and standees to make sure their reps were at the front of each line and in place for each press conference.
You can visit the conference virtually -- many of the official keynotes and talks also are posted on the CES Multimedia site, along with photos.
CES has grown this year to add content companies to its roster, with exhibits from Sony Pictures and NBC Universal -- so also you can catch segments from the conference on the Today Show, NBC Nightly News, Access Hollywood, and other properties.
For more on CES 2008, see my full CES 2008 Summary article -- with information on the conference and more links to resources.
Each year the major CE companies seek to upstage each other at CES by unveiling even larger flat-panel television displays, and this year saw a humongous 150-inch plasma display from Panasonic. The new TV lines are focusing on design, with thinner and more fashionable flat panel sets. TVs now can display overlaid windows with Web-like gadgets, showing news, weather, sports, and even general RSS feeds.
Connectivity is another big trend, as devices are building in connections -- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, wired and wireless, home network and Internet. We're getting closer to finding a consumer-friendly answer for home media storage and sharing, from disk servers to set-top boxes.
And there are plenty of me-too products following trends that consumers snapped up as holiday gifts, including portable media players, digital picture frames, headphones, and other accessories.
But there's still lots more here to talk about, once things settle down and these great demoed products actually ship for some real hands-on testing.