One of the CES 2009 innovation awards this year went to the i2i Stream which was initally explained very badly to me at the booth. I'll endeavour to do a better job of telling you why this little device is indeed an excellent gadget.

The Stream does what it begins to say on the tin. The system consists of two identical mini terminals which stream uncompressed HD quality audio wirelessly at 2.4GHz from one to the other. It doesn't matter which you choose to send with and which you use to receive. That can be switched at the touch of a button.

How do you make Left 4 Dead even better than it already is? The answer: play it with the Novint Falcon pistol grip mouse controller complete with authentic recoil action. It was hard to tear myself away from this one at CES 2009. Take a look and you'll see what I mean...

It's unlikely to be able to compete with the speeds of the trusty old mouse for hardcore PC gamers but it does add a certain edge to first person shooters, for how long though is another question.

More, more and more from CES 2009.

If the talk this year at CES 2009 has been about any one piece of hardware, it's been the Sony Vaio P Series non-netbook UMPC. We'd be doing you a serious diservice if we hadn't sent Susi down to take a closer, more camcodered look at the the full size keyboard, 8" LCD really expensive machine. So, we did...

Get deeper into CES 2009 with our wealth of coverage here.

I was convinced my love for Star Wars was over years ago but a chance encounter with a table full of Trilogy themed cases for the iPhone and iPod touch made me think twice at CES 2009.

They'll be out in all good iPhone accessory shops within the next two months for whatever the equivalent of $29.95 will be at the time. Some, like the Chewbacca and light saber models are all soft and rubbery. Others, like the Death Star and transparent Stormtrooper, are as hard as Vader himself.

Slightly amazing that these aren't all over the place already, even more surprising that I foud myself squealing like a squealy girl with delight when saw them.

CES 2009 can be found all over this page.

There's a saying at Motorola that they never met a operating system they didn't like. Mercifully, the Motorola Surf or A3100, depending upon whether you're man or machine, works on a sensible if not particularly my favourite platform.

Zara took a look at the Windows 6.1, touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera plus trackball device. Not bad for the much maligned mobile company.

If you like this, you might like more from CES 2009 just over here.

The benefit of owning a Sonoro dock is that you don't have to hate yourself. They actually look and sound pretty good. Two of the upgrades from CES 2009 are the Eclipse eDock and the Elements W internet radio - that's the one in the picture above.

Both feature the high gloss laquer and acrylic finish, the brushed metal navigation wheel and crisp and clear OLED displays. The Elements W is the simpler and probably less expensive of the two. It's an FM and Wi-Fi internet radio giving you access to Vladivostok FM and all the other 10,000 channels on the web.

Many of the companies exhibiting at CES have been going for years, but one company is making its first trip - Switzerland's Victorinox. The makers of the original Swiss Army Knife are exhibiting this - the "Presentation Pro", which comes with a flip-out 32GB USB drive.

Your data will be protected by a fingerprint scanner, and there's a laser pointer and bluetooth remote, as well as the standard knife, scissors and nail file. It'll be shipping in May in the US, and it'll cost $330 (£216). Just don't take it on business trips abroad.

Victorinox (via Engadget)

For more CES coverage, you want to look at our mega-index-post.

Here's HP's netbook, the Mini 2140. It's really rather nice, packing a good size keyboard, 10.1" screen and 80GB SSD. Decent price, too - but I'll let Zara reveal that one. Check out the video above to find out.

(via Shiny Shiny)

For more CES coverage than would fit on an 80GB SSD, click through to our index post.

I've just had a quick look in the archives, and it's been a long time since we covered an actual joystick product, as opposed to some sort of joystick-related piece of art or hackery. For the few of you who still use a joystick, then (flight sim enthusiasts?), here's the Thrustmaster T.16000M.

It's got some brand new tech, called H.E.A.R.T., which pretends to stand for "Hall Effect AccuRate Technology". Some "Hall Effect" magnets sit on the stick, giving the sensors far more precision than most other joysticks. On each axis, there's over 16,000 different values. That's a little ridiculous, but might be worth buying if the person with the steadiest hands in the world is your Secret Santa next year, and is a big flight-sim enthusiast.

The T.16000M is ambidextrous, comes with 16 action buttons, and offers a wide hand rest and weighted base as additional features. It'll be available in February and cost £50. That seems fairly cheap. Maybe I should give it a shot.

For more CES-related goodness, check out our index post.

There was a chap sitting next to me on the plane on the way out here from a company named Morel. It didn't surprise me that he turned out to be a CES 2009 exhibitor of a high end audio product after he pulled out a pair of electrostatic membrane in-ear headphones to plug into his arm rest. What did surprise me was that his product, The Fat Lady, won an award for innovation here at Vegas and, fortunately, I had a few hours for it to be explained to me in detail, and this is how it goes...

There's two reasons why these loudspeakers are called The Fat Lady. The obvious one is that they're shaped like the curves of a voluptuous woman. What's more the drive units were made in house to make sure the output matched and perfectly complimented the cabinet shape and acoustics. The second reason, however, is the more important of the two.

The insides of The Fat Lady, driver withstanding, are completely empty. There are no materials to dampen the sound and stop it from interfering with the output from the drivers which most speakers try to do. The trouble is, that as much as you can reduce the effect, it's impossible to dampen it out completely.

Gosh, what a long list of product names. No time for a long, gratuituous intro then, let's jump straight into specs.

The big hitters are the EX-FS10 and EX-FC100. The former has a 9.1-megapixel sensor and 3x optical zoom. It's 16.3mm thin, and has a 2.5" LCD display. The latter is also 9.1 megapixel, and expands to a 5x zoom and 2.7" display. It's also got CMOS anti-shake.

Impressively, though, they can both capture at amazingly high speeds - 30 shots-per-second 6-megapixel still images, and movies at up to 1,000fps. That speed is going to good use, too - you can set it to take a burst, and automatically pick the least blurred, smiliest, eyes-open photo, or you can pick the best one yourself. It'll also do 720p HD video. $350 (£231) for the EX-FS10, and $400 (£264) for the EX-FC100, both out in April in the UK, prices here TBC.

Previously known as "Nova", Palm has just rechristened and launched its new OS "Web OS". It's an amazingly dreary name for a collection of concepts that could reshape how we use our mobile mobiles (but probably won't). The bottom line is that Palm is bending head-over-heels to make their platform easy for developers - so easy that they reckon anyone who knows HTML, CSS and XML will be able to write an app.

The UI, even though I detest the comparison, is very iPhone-like. You flick the display to scroll around, and there's various gestures that you can use, too. Everything's managed with a 'cards' metaphor, where you see a deck that can be rotated with a finger and shuffled. The biggest feature, though, is something called "Synergy".

The rumours were true. Palm's got a brand new device to go with its spangly new Nova operating system. All we knew previously was that it had a portrait touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but now there's a bit more info to go with it.

That touchscreen measures 3.1" diagonally, at 480x320 resolution. The slide-out keyboard doesn't come straight out - it sorta curves. There's oodles of connectivity - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and EVDO. There's a removable battery, 8GB of storage, microUSB connector, 3-megapixel camera, a nifty-looking wireless charger and - YAY! - a 3.5mm headphone jack.

It's running the new Nova OS, but more about that in another post. It'll be available in the "first half" of 2009. In the meantime, for more CES coverage, click here.

EDIT: Palm's launched a website for the device and OS.

(via Gizmodo's liveblog)

Gosh, Sony's new Cybershot G3 camera has an inbuilt web browser! Eat that, Eye-Fi. You can log on to a wireless hotspot, and surf the web to your heart's content. Disclaimer - depending on the sites that your heart wants to render, it may not end up 100% content.

Sony provides a "Easy Upload" homepage, with quick links to Shutterfly, Picasa, Dailymotion, Photobucket and YouTube (no Flickr?). It'll store your login information, too, so you don't have to type it in on the 3.5" touchscreen every time. But what about the camera itself? It's got a 10 megapixel sensor, 4x optical zoom and Face Detection, along with 4GB of internal storage. Available right now, for $500 (£330).

(via Gizmodo)

For more CES stories, click here.

Right, this is defintely the last time I'm writing the word Samsung today and that's only because the HT-BD8200 is the first and only sound bar to include a Blu-ray player. What is it with them and Blu-ray this year?

The 2.6" thick bar has a subwoofer and, guess what? Not only does it have USB ports and both Wi-Fi and Ethernet connectivity but it's also wall mountable too. Was this Samsung's idea for everything this year? Damn it, I wrote their name again.

Glad to see Samsung didn't forget simple stills photography today with the launch of four compact cameras for the world to papp with. The SL102 and SL420 are 10.2-megapixel additions to the familiar SL range but it's the 16.6mm thin TL100 and the 24mm ultra wide, 10x mega zoom HZ10W that are of greater interest today.

Above is the HZ10W which shoots 720p HD video at 30 fps with H.264 compression. It's got a 10.2-megapixel sensor and both optical and digital image stabilization to help your shaking fingers at maximum zoom.

Samsung has pulled another exclusive out the bag but for how long is another question. Among their fleet of camcorders just announced is the flagship Samsung HMX-H106 which is the first to feature a 64GB SSD, slightly depressingly giving it more storage than any hardware I own.

All this space means that you can record up to a staggering 12 hours of footage at maximum picture quality settings! The rest of the range H range is made up of the H105, H104 and the H100 with 32GB, 16GB and 0GB of solid state storage respectively. They also all have SD/SDHC card slots which is why the H100 isn't completelt useless.

Alongside the glut of screens and assorted boxed up circuitry, Samsung announced the slightly bizarre but rather attractive wall mountable BD-P4600 Blu-ray player. Funnily enough, it's the first wall mountable Blu-ray player largely because most normal people aren't interested in stapling all appliance to their masonry. What's next? The kettle? The 1" microwave?

The product that Samsung seems most proud of at CES 2009 is their low power, super thin Luxia range of LED TVs. The 8000, 7000, and, yes, 6000 thousand models sit between 44" and 55" on the diagonal and use 40% less power than normal flat screen TVs because of the use of low power LEDs rather than the tubes associated with LCDs.

Next up at CES 2009 is the turn of tech monster Samsung. It's hard to tell what the world's largest gadget makers will come up with this year. The trouble is they make just about everything, so who knows upon which band wagon it is they wish to jump. Quite possibly they'll surprise us all and invent something on their own. I'll let you know as soon as I do from 22.00 GMT.

Ok, so the stage is set, the lights are blue and the conference room here in Vegas is stuffed to the gunnels in anticipation of the one thousand and one items that Samsung is set to reveal at CES 2009. Here we go...

22.42 Everyone's now rushing out and me with them. It's just questions and the usual protracted nonsense from here on in. Product posts on their way.

22.40 Stills digi camera - HZ10W and the P3 latest palm sized PMP. It comes with haptic feedback and all the widgets of a certain other handheld.