There's so much to see at CES that you have to treat it like speed dating and spend just enough time on each stand to identify the interesting products. Here's a high-speed tour of the stands in the South and Central halls, presented in CES style: one stand, one product, one sentence.
Belkin showcased lots of accessories that you don't need but would quite like to own, including plastic and brushed metal cases that make your new iPod look just like a new iPod.
Although Hitachi's stand was dominated by plasma screens, the most intriguing product was the Hitachi Hybrid camcorder, which combines an 8GB hard drive with a DVD burner, giving you a choice of formats and the option to edit your footage on the camera.
HP's TouchSmart PC is an all-one-desktop with a touch-sensitive screen and some neat applications, including a bulletin-board style family calendar.
Kodak excited the photogeeks with its new 10-inch and 8-inch EasyShare Digital Picture Frames, which connect to Kodak's Gallery Web site via Wi-Fi and display photos from your online albums.
The undoubted star of the LG stand was its Super Multi Blue Player, which sits on the fence and supports both HD DVD and Blu-ray.
Logitech's Harmony 1000 is a universal remote control that can be programmed via an online database with details of tens of thousands of televisions and home cinema components.
"The Wow starts now" at the Microsoft stand, apparently -- although it featured many products from other companies, as if to prove that Windows Vista is a cool kid with lots of friends.
Nokia's 770 is reborn as the Nokia N800, a pocket-sized Internet tablet that lets you browse the Web using Wi-Fi or via a Bluetooth connection to your mobile phone.
Panasonic's new hi-def products include the HDC-SD1, a compact three CCD camcorder that records 1080i video onto SD memory cards.
Philips celebrated the sale of its millionth television with Ambilight with a one-off version of the 42PF9831D LCD that has 2,000 diamonds sprinkled around the frame.
Sandisk's Sansa View is a lightweight, flash-based media player that holds up to 8GB of videos, photos and music.
The two-faced Samsung Ultra Music F300 has a phone on one side and an MP3 player on the other, but still manages to be slimmer than most single-function devices.
Just when you thought that flash memory had taken over the world, along comes Seagate with the FreeAgent Go Small, a 12GB portable hard drive that's barely any bigger than a box of matches.
Sharp had the biggest television, a 108-inch LCD -- although unlike Panasonic's 103-inch plasma, it's not available to buy.
The coolest thing on the Sony stand was the display of prototype OLED displays, which wowed visitors with their jewel-like colours and superslim profiles.
Toshiba's stand was overwhelmed by a cacophony of branding -- Toshiba, Regza, Qosmio -- but the company continues to be one of the principal flag bearers for the HD DVD format. -ML