It's been a raucous 24 hours at the Consumer Electronics Show and the show floor hasn't even opened yet.
I touched down in Vegas Sunday at 10:45 a.m. after being up all night because of the Northern California storms, and headed straight for the Las Vegas Convention Center so I could put the finishing touches on our story NBC Nightly News.
From there, on to the Bill Gates keynote; from there, back to the truck to feed tape. Then to the hotel by 9:30 p.m. Then up at 1:15 a.m. to begin our coverage for network affiliates and CNBC this morning.
In between all that, I have had the chance to play with some neat stuff, most notably the OLED flat screen television from Sony. We've seen prototypes of this before, but the 11-inch screen goes on sale today for a whopping $2,500. But wow, what a screen: thinner than a couple of credit cards, it's full HD and gorgeous. It's also "green," since it eliminates the "always on" backlight in other flat panels.
Also from Sony , the hybrid UH 20 camcorder that records on DVDs, an internal hard drive and a Sony memory stick for unprecedented consumer options. And all high definition. Nifty stuff.
Not to be outdone: Samsung showed us its new HD digicams, HD camcorders with amazing quality, a flash drive that can store two hours of video and even a slo-mo capability. Great for sports fanatics and soccer moms and dads.
Some other things that caught my eye: the electronic pen from tiny Epos. We've seen this kind of thing before, but many of those predecessors needed a special kind of paper to capture your scribbles. Epos works on any paper, connects to your computer via USB port and anything you wrote is uploaded into your PC. The Israeli company is doing so well that its main financial backer is Intel Corp .
