The Consumer Electronics Show for 2010 (CES 2010) is nearly over and all of the big announcements have been made. Between the hype and actual products, there's sometimes a pretty big gap, but for gear junkies and geeks, this is bigger than Christmas! Here's some of what we've seen so far, with a dash of my usual snarky skeptical editorial comments, just fer fun:

Microsoft announces its new tablet! Yawn. Partnering with HP, no one has been talking about this device, even though the HP Slate is merely a less-sexy and less-expensive sibling to what Apple will announce next month. Besides, tablets have been out for a decade anyhow. (Anyone else remember Comdex 2000 and the Microsoft Tablet PC?) So. Hooray. We take an incremental step forward, combining netbooks (smartbooks?) with tablets and e-readers. By the way, I AM a huge fan of the format and already own a tablet and am personally excited to see what Apple (et al) will come up with, I'm just expressing skepticism that this is anything radically new, revolutionary or game changing. It's not, not when Steve Ballmer says it, not when Steve Jobs does.

From Big But Boring News to Small But Exciting: Sony announces they will support the SD memory format! Really! It's always fun to tease Sony about their proprietary memory stick format, but sincerely, this makes a difference and is a win for consumers and it should be a win for Sony as well. Hooray!

3D, 3D, 3D. Yawn. Panasonic re-announced a $21,000 camera we already knew about and some televisions we didn't, Samsung reveals new 3D televisions, LG has new 3D monitors, Sony says the PS3 will play 3D games and movies...and everyone and their brother is going 3D. Thanks, James Cameron.  The short of it is you can call any display device or player "3D" if it supports a 120Hz refresh rate - 60Hz for the left eye, 60Hz for the right - which means all TVs will be "3D" soon enough.  Now if we just had some 3D content to watch, we might have something here. Despite billions of dollars of industry money and wisdom going against me (including 2009 box office numbers, which I'd argue are irrelevant in the CE space), I'm still going to declare this a big FAIL. 3D is a gimmick (except maybe in games), it doesn't look as good as quality 2D overall, it is a huge production and post pain-in-the-butt and consumers are still in debt from buying their native 1080p televisions. Or 1080i. Or 720p. Wow, some of you are three generations behind already?!

More tablets, woot! I told you I was sincerely a fan of the format and while Microsoft pushing tablets (again) or Apple joining the party a decade late doesn't impress me, the innovation at the edges is exciting. For example, Lenovo announced its goofy hybrid IdeaPad U1. I like the thinking here (it's a light slate tablet for reading and you can dock it to a more powerful base), but it is going to be $1,000 and the prototype just isn't that flashy. Personally, if I had to pick a product today, I think I'd get me an HP TouchSmart tm2 ($950) tablet as my all-purpose road-warrior machine or the IdeaPad S10-3t for $499 and sync that with a real computer, instead of a goofy base. The enTourage eDGe (someone smack the marketeer that came up with the capitalization on that one) is certainly innovative, but personally, I'd rather have a keyboard+screen instead of two different types of screens.

Samsung revealed WiFi wireless camcorders. Neat! Definitely consumer level, but the 1/2.3-inch image sensors are nothing to sneeze at and I'd expect the quality to be great and the convenience to be unbeatable. Now if you just owned a telly that had WiFi, you'd be good to go. Then again, if your camcorder shot to SD memory cards, you could always just get an Eye-Fi Pro card and turn any device into a wireless one. Sweet!

Blue Microphones has a nice new Mikey stereo mic aimed at podcasters, but at $99, it'll probably have even wider appeal with both USB and 3.5mm output. Speaking of USB, VIA released a USB 3.0 interface card...not that there's anything to plug into it. Now your mouse will be even faster!

In the category of Products So Cool We'll Never Be Able to Buy One, the Skiff Reader is a large format, flexible e-reader that I want so bad I can taste it. Without color and with technical glitches that'll never get worked out and after the device ends up being way to expensive because they can't find a huge media partner, it'll get canceled. I hope I'm wrong and I hope the company figures out some way to profit from all the awesome research that's gone into the device. Maybe if they sold out to Apple? Or what about off-grid hydrogen fuel cell chargers? That's what Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies promises. Fantastic technology and I also hope these guys (and gals) are getting the dev money they need to continue, but as long as coal-fired electricity costs 15¢/kWh, it'll never take off.

Finally (and I must insist that there's more that I missed than what I've covered - CES 2010 was a fairly epic event), there's news from the projector realm, including an LED projector from Samsung. Just like I'm a big fan of tablets, I'm also an enthusiastic evangelist for projectors. At $2,000 for a 1080p entry-level model, it is sort of affordable too (by modern television standards) with one, huge, gaping caveat: the bulbs are about $400 each. And they only last a couple of years, at best. Unless you get an LED projector. Ah ha! Very pragmatic. And finally (finally), here's my final product at the opposite end of the spectrum, that is products that look really cool when you first see them but then you wonder "Yea, but what would I use it for?": the Light Touch interactive projector. You hook it up to your iPhone or whatever and it projects the screen on any surface (e.g., a table top) and you can interact with your device that way. Yea. Neat. But what would I use it for?