Robert S. Anthony

If the colorful iPad add-ons shown at Toy Fair 2012 were any indication, your well-worn work companion will never get a moment’s rest again. Game makers have surrendered: If they can’t beat the iPad, they can join it with nifty add-ons and just have some fun.

For example, the $60 Game Changer for iPad from Identity Games (see photo above) uses an iPad as the centerpiece of a game board which changes as you place plastic game overlays on it. The board has 24 pressure points on either side of the iPad, which slides into a cradle in the center.

No, it wasn’t the black bomb bird or the one that poops explosive charges, but the sight of a red Angry Bird patrolling the skies at last week's Toy Fair 2012 was jarring just the same, even as it generated smiles by the dozen.

William Mark Corp., which markets a line of remote-controlled, helium-filled Air Swimmer flying toys, recently acquired a license to create flying Angry Birds characters like the red one that flew above the company’s booth at the Toy Fair. Current Air Swimmers are fish like sharks or colorful clownfish.

If the thought of rolling your $200 smartphone on your living room floor like it was a bowling ball or bouncing it off the carpet sounds less than wise, don’t worry. TheO has everything covered--literally.

TheO, a smartphone entertainment package from Physical Apps made its debut at the 2012 Toy Fair in New York Sunday. It combines a bowling-ball-sized foam ball with smartphone apps that take advantage of the accelerometers built into most smartphones. Download a TheO apps into your iOS or Android phone, securely tuck it into the center of the foam ball, and you’re ready to play games like hot potato and bowling.

The diminutive Boomz Audio Mini Speaker would have been awful easy to miss at the 2012 International CES if the $40 unit had not been blasting out music loud and clear enough to get passersby to stop, lean over and take notice.

The Boomz Audio Mini Speaker and MP3 player is aimed at those who want to get decent sound from the music in their iPods and smartphones when they’re not tethered to their headsets, said Vincent Khristov, CEO of the Lake Forest, Illinois-based company.

You usually wouldn’t want a screaming band of frenetic children to get their grabby little hands all over your tech gear, but MultiTouch Ltd. looks forward to just that every day. At CES 2012, the Finland-based company launched the MT550W7 MultiTaction Cell 55-inch Full HD LCD Embedded Windows interactive touch display, a unit which can keep up with what dozens of hands and fingers are doing to it at the same time.

While the company is hardly a startup, it showed off its proprietary finger-following technology at Startup Debut, a technology showcase held Sunday at CES 2012. MultiTouch kid-friendly touch displays are already installed in museums and other public venues around the world, including at the NASA Space Center in Houston.

Are two pieces better than one? Boost Case is betting that they are with its $79.95 Boost Case Hybrid extended iPhone battery.

Unlike thick, single-piece external iPhone batteries that require you to remove your phone case before you can use them, the Boost Case Hybrid comes in two pieces: The first is a light protective shell that can stay on the phone at all times; the second piece is the actual extended battery.

In the future, you may not need a protective case to use your phone in the pool. Go ahead, toss it in--the HzO nanotechnology will protect it from the H20.

At the recent New York Press Preview for the 2012 International CES set to take place in Las Vegas this coming January, HzO CEO Paul S. Clayson, armed with a smartphone and a bowl of water, showed how his company’s nanotechnology can protect electronic gadgets from moisture even when they’re completely immersed in water.

If Polaroid’s new Z340 Instant Digital Camera looks like something you’ve seen before, you’re showing your age. The new 14-megapixel digital camera with a built-in digital photo printer (which can generate dry prints in 45 seconds) was crafted to resemble the popular Polaroid Spectra cameras of the 1980s.

The $300 unit does more than just make 3-by-4-inch prints on demand; you can also edit and frame the images before printing, or you can shut the printer off and use it as a standard digital camera. You can use a "classic" Polaroid white border to generate prints that look like the old-style Polaroid prints, or crop the image and use of the more colorful frames in the camera’s built-in library.

If the Mutewatch digital watch strikes you at first as nothing more than a colorful and stylish wristband, inventor Mai-Li Hammargren has already won half the battle.

The $259 Mutewatch has an all-touch interface and a silent vibrating alarm, a feature which Hammargren said was the idea she started with in 2007: She wanted to design an alarm that would wake her up without waking up her boyfriend.

If the steady line of autograph-hungry Fanny Wang headset fans at a Manhattan electronics store was any indication, these new bass-boosting over-the-ear headsets may give Monster Cable’s DJ-friendly Beats by Dr. Dre headset a run for its money. At least that’s what Fanny Wang CEO Tim Hickman hopes.

Fanny Wang’s 2001 Over Ear DJ ($250) and Active Noise Canceling headphones ($300) make visual fashion statements as well as audible ones, with their first-in-class 50mm earpiece drivers. A small switch kicks in the bass booster, or sets the headset to a “clear channel” setting for jazz and other music where the bass boost isn’t essential.

How many journalists does it take to set up a wireless audio system? Hopefully just one; the same number required to screw a couple AudioBulbs, a new LED light and speaker system from GiiNii International, into a couple lamps or light fixtures. Once paired with an AudioBulb base station (pictured above), which doubles as an iPod dock, you have a complete wireless audio system with minimum setup time.

The AudioBulb system, which will retail for $300 and include two AudioBulbs and a base station, was unveiled at the recent Pepcom press-only Holiday Spectacular event in New York. Up to eight AudioBulbs can be controlled with a base station, which has a standard 30-pin iPodconnector as well as a 3.5mm input jack for audio from other sources. Additional AudioBulbs are $100 each.

Grab some popcorn, your iPad, and Epson's new MegaPlex portable projectors and you're ready for a night at the movies. The MegaPlex units have an iPad-, iPhone-, and iPod-compatible dock on the front and can project large, high-resolution videos or still images from the content stored on your iOS unit or from online sources such as YouTube. The MegaPlex units also work with a variety of other devices.

The $699 Epson MegaPlex MG-50 (540p video resolution with 2,200 lumens of brightness) and $799 MG-850H (720p, 2,800 lumens) projectors use 3LCD technology and are dock-and-play devices: You insert your iPad, iPhone or iPod into the dock and follow the on-screen prompts from the MegaPlex app.