Tech Show Surprises, and the Stale

The star of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show wasn’t even there.

That might sound like an odd remark, but it’s true. Look, summing up the major trends of North America’s biggest trade show is more or less hopeless; there were 2,700 booths and 140,000 attendees, for heaven’s sake. But if you had to name the major player, it had to be the Apple iPad — and Apple didn’t show up.

Seriously. They should have called it the Consumer iPad Show. Here were iPad cases, iPad holders, iPad keyboards, iPad chargers, iPad alarm clocks — and 85 iPad clones. It seemed as if anyone who knew the phone number of an Asian touch-screen factory had a tablet prototype.

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Motorola Atrix

“These companies are like 6-year-olds on a soccer team,” one company representative told me. “The ball goes over here, and they all run after it in a blob. ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ‘Tablet!’ ”

Most of the new tablets run Google’s Android mobile operating system — a new version that Google says is better suited for a tablet’s larger screen. There are exceptions, though. The great-looking, forthcoming BlackBerry Playbook runs its own special operating system, for example (bummer — no well-stocked app store). And Hewlett-Packard’s eagerly awaited tablets weren’t on display at the show, but the company makes no secret that they’ll run WebOS, an attractive chunk of software that Palm developed for its Palm Pre app phones. (H.P. bought Palm last year for $1.2 billion.)

The new tablets would take aim at the current iPad’s weak spots. The rivals have built-in cameras, for example, or offer a choice of screen sizes.

This battle should make for some fascinating spectating. One major reason Android phones have become so popular is that when you bought an iPhone, you had to sign up for AT&T. If you wanted Verizon , you probably went with Android. (That, of course, has all changed; starting next month, Verizon will offer the iPhone, too.)

But with a tablet, you don’t particularly need a cellular connection. Plenty of people lead long, happy lives having only Wi-Fi connections on their tablets. In other words, the iPad-versus-clones battle will boil down to quality, price and features — exactly as it should be.

The second theme of C.E.S. was, once again, Technologies We Desperately Wish You’d Want. For the 417th straight C.E.S., the industry trotted out yet another vision of the Connected Home (your appliances, home theater and other gadgets all on a big network). And for the 417th straight year, nobody in Americaland will have any interest.

This year, too, was the biggest push yet toward connecting your TV to the Internet. Not to download movies and TV shows; that’s a natural, popular feature. No, we’re talking about browsing the Web and doing e-mail on your TV screen — an idea that dies year after year, and will die again this time (sorry, Google and Yahoo ). Nobody wants to sit down at the TV and pick up a keyboard and mouse, except maybe a few people on the lunatech fringe.

The technology the industry most wants to push down our throats, though, is 3-D. For the second C.E.S. in a row, blurry, double-vision flat panels were hung on every available surface of the Las Vegas Convention Center — televisions that looked sharp only when you put on ridiculous-looking 3-D glasses. Many of those glasses are just as big, heavy and expensive as last year’s crop (at $100 a pair, exactly how many friends will earn a place at your Super Bowl party?).

Fortunately, an effort was clearly in progress to make the glasses less hideous — or even to eliminate them altogether. More companies than ever (Sony, Toshiba and others) had new, glasses-less 3-D TV sets on display. They’re pretty awful; you have to sit exactly dead-center, which means that only one person at a time can watch. Even then, the image isn’t sharp; in fact, it seems to be made up of little beads. But the engineers and marketers will no doubt keep at it. What else is there to do when they’re not designing iPad clones?

So far, Americans haven’t expressed any interest in 3-D — maybe because it requires buying a new TV, new Blu-ray player and all new movie discs. But Panasonic, Sony and others paraded 3-D still cameras and 3-D camcorders this year, in hopes of jump-starting the whole mess.

A third big message of C.E.S. this year was, “4G is coming soon.” Verizon and AT&T, in particular, must have spent the equivalent of Google’s Internet bill to plaster C.E.S. with ads. They’re promoting their coming cell network upgrades, which will give your cellphone faster Internet connections. But don’t count on coast-to-coast any time soon. The rollout will take years.

CES 2011 - Your Digital Life - A CNBC Special Report

As always, the most fun at C.E.S. was in finding the little gems that weren’t on the obligatory list: radar detectors, pico projectors, baby monitors, no-name e-book readers, car theater and on and on.

General Electric, for example, made its first C.E.S. appearance to show how high tech can mean low energy bills. The company estimates that by 2012, 40 million American homes will be billed for electricity depending on the time of day they use it. G.E.’s new appliances, therefore, communicate with your electric meter to shift the heaviest loads to off-peak times: dishwashers, fridges and water heaters that wait until the wee, cheap hours of the night to do their washing, defrosting and heating.

More obscure companies did some eco-thinking, too. An outfit called ThinkEco demonstrated its “intelligent outlet” — a wall plug that learns when you use whatever’s plugged into it, and then cuts power during the hours when you never use it.

Nobody knows if Casio’s new, still unreleased Tryx digital camera will take decent photos. But its design is fresh and ingenious. You clutch an outer frame; the touch-screen camera part spins freely inside it, like a gyroscope. You can point it away from you, toward you or at any angle, which is handy when you use the outer frame as a stand to prop the camera up by itself.

The darling of the show, though, may have been the new Motorola Atrix. At first glance, it’s pretty much like any other modern Android app phone: front and back cameras, biggish screen. You swipe your finger across a fingerprint scanner to simultaneously unlock and wake the phone.

But the twist is the accompanying laptop. It’s beautiful — like a black MacBook Air — incredibly sleek, thin and light (2.4 pounds). But it has no processor, storage or memory of its own.

Instead, you snap the phone into the laptop. You don’t have to shut anything down or enter any special mode. It’s like putting the brain into Frankenstein’s monster. Suddenly, whatever was on the phone’s screen now fills the laptop’s screen, giving you much more real estate, plus a trackpad and full keyboard. You can attach an external hard drive and mouse, if you like. The phone provides the processor, memory, Internet connection and, of course, all your photos, videos, music and files.

It’s a very clever idea. Now you don’t have two copies of everything. You don’t have to sync anything (music, photos, videos, mail, Office files) — your phone contains all the live copies. And what a neat twist that you can run the hundreds of thousands of Android apps on a full-size screen. The Atrix seems like a winning idea that could save a lot of mobile workers a lot of weight, hassle and equipment.

There were, of course, about 2,695 other gadgets on display at C.E.S. this year — and the show itself was a lot more exciting than last year’s Tanking Economy Edition. In the end, that — the resurgence of innovation and investment — may be the biggest C.E.S. news of all.

David Pogue is a columnist for the New York Times and contributor to CNBC. He can be emailed at: [e-mail].