Last week saw a flurry of new products being unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, but one that didn't attract much coverage until the weekend looks pretty compelling.

It's yet another example of what I call the march of the tiny Linux PCs that's been going on for close to a year now, and it's got a diminutive price point to match its size.

New from the creator of the MK802—another notable exemplar of this trend—the RK3066 is a miniature Android PC that's just $55.

Bluetooth support

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PCs were upstaged by tablets, smartphones and TVs at this year’s International CES show, with some companies maintaining a smaller presence or holding back product announcements for a later date.

There were fewer product announcements from PC makers compared to previous years, with some companies waiting for the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 25-28.

“I think the timing of CES was bad this year for the PC cycle, and several did mention MWC as a venue for their next announcements,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, who attended the show.

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The International CES is packed to the rafters with the latest in shiny, often expensive high-tech gadgets, so it's no surprise that theft is a problem for companies exhibiting at the show.

Several vendors who rent space on the show floor said they had been victims of crime over the week of the show. They were mostly incidents of petty theft, or petit larceny as it's called in the state of Nevada, though one company said its booth had been broken into overnight.

Las Vegas police say it's hard to get a fix on the amount of crime at the show, since some incidents go unreported and others are reported only to security guards hired to work at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

"If we don't see a report filed, it basically didn't happen," said Detective Vinnie Jones of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's Tourist Crimes Unit.

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This year's Consumer Electronics Show is drawing to a close and most tech sites are handing out opinions and awards about which gadgets were the best in show for 2013.

Among the big hits were Panasonic's 4K tablet, the massive Samsung 110-inch Ultra HD TV, Kingston's 1TB thumb drive, and the Fitbit Flex wearable fitness band.

Based on the raves on CNET, CNN, Digital Trends, Gizmodo, IGN, Laptop Mag, and other sites tracking the CES action, here's a look at the top five gadgets that stood out from the pack for many tech gear critics.

Tablet for gamers: Razer Edge

Game gear maker Razer wowed the crowds at CES with the Edge, a 10-inch Windows 8 tablet geared for gamers packed with 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core i5 processor, a 65GB SSD, and an Nvidia GT640M LE GPU.

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LAS VEGAS—George and Judy Jetson would feel right at home at the CES floor here. With smart washing machines, magic remotes, and refrigerators that blast Top 40 hits, the automated home has arrived.

Sure, some of the home “innovations” we’ve seen at CES are a little laughable. Do we really need dancing robot vacuum cleaners or refrigerators that post Facebook updates? Maybe not. But home automation is becoming more capable and impressive, if only because we’re realizing these fantasy homes are finally possible. (See also "Smart home appliances are a big deal at CES 2013.")

Smart, smarter, smartest

“Smart” is the buzzword that just won’t die, particularly when it comes to home appliances.

Remember when a dishwasher was just a dishwasher? Those days are long gone. Now your dishwasher is smart—Internet connectivity gives it an app for a brain. We’ve seen plenty of smart appliances at CES over the past few years, but Wi-Fi now connects your refrigerator to your oven to dishwasher to your phone.

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LAS VEGAS—Massage therapy gets automated with the WheeMe robot, which promises to caress and tickle as its wheels and small rotor run over your back.

Sensors determine the slope of its subject so the robot massager can shift direction and keep rolling, instead of falling off its subject, according to representatives of DreamBots, developer of the palm-size massage therapist.

A unit measures 5 by 3.8 by 3.1 inches and weighs about 12 ounces; it rolls along at just under two inches per second. Units are available in white and blue or white and red. It runs on three AA batteries.

The WheeMe apparently rolled through CES previously, but is now available through several distributors in the U.S. and internationally. Representatives at CES said it sells for $69 to $79, but it's priced at $199 in the U.S. through partner Pinook.

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For techies like ourselves, CES is the Greatest Show on Earth (P.T. Barnum, eat your heart out). So trust us when we tell you these are the things from CES that you don’t want to miss. You’ll thank us later.

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LAS VEGAS—Wouldn’t it be handy to have a single wireless charging solution for all of your family’s smartphones? That’s the concept behind the new Magnetyze line of cases and wireless charging bases from BuQu Tech, shown here at CES.

At least, that's the idea if your home has the Apple iPhone 4 and 4S, and the Samsung Galaxy S III. BuQu Tech says its first products, supporting those devices, are scheduled to ship in the first quarter; iPhone 5 and Galaxy Note II varietals are coming later this year.

Once you clap a Magnetyze case onto your smartphone, you can charge it and synchronize data with your PC by simply resting the phone on a Magnetyze base. As the system's name implies, the holds the phone securely in place with magnets. The base units come in various forms from a desktop stand ($30), car ($50), and wall ($40) chargers, and a pancake-like flat desktop charging disc ($30).

Unlike inductive charging systems that support no real electrical connection between the phone’s battery and the charging unit, the Magnetyze system uses a conductive design, which means that electrical contacts on the base must line up with the contacts on the phone case. This is easily done since the magnets in the base stations pull the phones into position.

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LAS VEGAS—Most GPS devices excel at getting you from Point A to Point B. Where they come up short is in telling you about all the stuff in between.

Magellan thinks it can change that with its forthcoming SmartGPS device. Slated for a spring release, the device aims to do a better job of identifying what's around you than the traditional points of interest.

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LAS VEGAS—Fear not, deep-sea divers: Now you can take your smartphone with you on those icy underwater trips.

Loksak’s line of transparent protective bags for smartphones, e-readers, and tablets on display at the International CES act as barriers against the elements for your gadgets. Water, sand, and snow don’t stand a chance against the sacks’ hermetic seals.

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LAS VEGAS—When it comes to any sort of dancing, I normally just turn around and run right away. But not mRobo, the dancing robot made by Tosy that has a speaker firmly embedded in its torso. When it's activated, mRobo comes out of its shell to show off its talents, expanding to form a full-fledged dancing robot. mRobo will not only play music, but it'll dance along to it, making it one of the more entertaining ways to listen to music of almost any kind.

mRobo isn't limited in its dance moves, either, as you can upload your own music using either a Mac or PC. From there, you can even use Tosy's Tune Robo software to program a custom set of dance moves for said music.

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LAS VEGAS—With the astounding number of products and devices being shown at CES, there are always a few that are weird enough to give you pause (this year’s best example being the Mondo Spider), and a few things that you simply wouldn’t expect to see.

One of the things that we never expected was the a booth where folks were eagerly crowding around kisoks, awaiting their turn to stick their fingers into what looked like a futuristic washing machine—but was actually an inkjet printer for painting fingernails.

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LAS VEGAS—While dedicated e-readers struggle in the face of competition from multipurpose tablets, the company E Ink and its electrophoretic display technology (more commonly known as electronic paper) continues to evolve.

For starters, the next wave of e-readers should complete the shift towards high-resolution, 768 by 1024 pixel, 6-inch displays, according to E Ink spokesperson Sriram Peruvemba. The current standard is 600 by 800 pixel resolution; only two e-readers have hit the higher-resolution—the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, and the now-discontinued iRiver Story HD. At 212 dpi, the higher-res display can help smooth how text appears.

Also expect to find faster page turn samples. For example, the fourth-generation Kindle can turn 5 to 6 pages without the flashing effect on the page; next year, Peruvemba says, it will be total of 25 pages with any flash. “We've tested the software for even more than 25, but we're advertising 25. and we've minimized the flash so much that most people won't even notice it,” he says.

Don't go looking for a color E Ink display any time soon, though. Although E Ink demoed some electronic display sign examples with spot color and motion support, and Etaco has a color device available for educational markets, that's where they'll stay for now. “The color displays have primarily gotten some traction in the textbook market,” explains Peruvemba.

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LAS VEGAS—Ford’s big announcement at CES was the launch of a developers program to entice third-party software makers to build programs as part of its automobile app ecosystem called SYNC AppLink. Dovetailing the news, Ford says it has formed nine new partnerships with app developers from its three app categories: News and Information, Music and Entertainment, and Navigation and Location.

In the News and Information category, Ford partnered with The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Kaliki. The Wall Street Journal’s mobile app now works over Ford’s SYNC AppLink, and has both live and on-demand radio programming so that drivers can stay on top of the news. USA Today’s mobile app is similar—drivers can have USA Today headlines and news read to them (in a natural, human voice) over their car’s speaker system. Kaliki is a free magazine app that, when hooked up to SYNC AppLink, features radio talent reading magazine articles and news stories.

In the Music and Entertainment category, Ford partnered with Amazon Cloud Player, Aha Radio, Rhapsody, and Greater Media. Drivers can now stream music from the Internet using Amazon Cloud Player, Aha Radio, or Rhapsody, though they may need a subscription. Greater Media offers up streaming local radio channels, so that drivers can listen to their favorite channels no matter where they are. All music streaming requires (and uses, sometimes heavily) a mobile data plan.

Finally, in the Navigation and Location category, Ford has partnered with Glympse and BeCouply. Glympse is an app that lets you tell your friends and family where you are with automatic updates (and ETAs). This way, you don’t have to be constantly texting or calling people when you’re on your way to the party—they can just check Glympse to see where you are and when the app thinks you’ll get there. BeCouply, which was created by a guy for his girlfriend (aww), is a date-finding app. The BeCouply app lets you find cool places to take your date, based on what you want to do. For example, if you want to go bowling the app will list local bowling places and even direct you straight to them.

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LAS VEGAS—It's official: We've entered the tablet age, and 2013 looks to be a great year for slates. Tablets appeared in all forms at the International CES and were just about everywhere you looked—and the noteworthy and innovative models featured Windows 8, not Android, inside.

Tablets were also the focus of discussion for component makers: Every major chip announcement involved jockeying for position in the tablet market, and even storage suppliers waxed poetic about tablets driving the demand for flash storage.

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LAS VEGAS— I’m currently on the apartment hunt, and it seems like every time I want to go check out a new place, my tape measure is no where to be found. Incipio’s AR Stanley Case for the iPhone 5 could help me out in such situations. The case houses a detachable widget that, when paired with an app, helps you measure any short distance using augmented reality. This new virtual tool debuted at CES this week, and I had a chance to test it out.

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LAS VEGAS—It’s the third day of CES, and everything’s starting to wind down. Most of the companies made their big announcements earlier in the show, so we took a look at some of the smaller—but still awesome—products.

Displair wowed us with a machine that combines a stream of air with tiny water droplets to create a virtual display that appears in front of you. Watching a movie or playing a video game on a screen made of water is a great party trick, and it's just plain cool tech.

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LAS VEGAS—Hey, stop eating.

Most people shovel their meals into their mouths too quickly for their bodies to process, which means the stomach still feels hunger even though it’s full.

HAPIlabs’ electronic HAPIfork vibrates when you eat too fast, reminding you to slow down. The HAPIfork measures the length of time between bites, and how long it takes you to polish off your meal. The fork contains a USB drive that stores the information on your eating patterns so you can download it to the HAPIlabs app. The program also offers food coaching so you can change your eating behaviors.

The electronic fork doesn’t count calories, so if you’re eating a pile of chocolate chip pancakes very slowly, it won’t vibrate or advise you to ditch the sweets and switch to egg whites.

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LAS VEGAS— Ever wish you were in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids"? HP let us live out that fantasy with an over-sized HP laptop where you stomp on the actual functioning keys.

Our very own Amber Bouman and Zack Stern take a moment out of their busy schedule for a brief trivia competition using the behemoth. It's unclear who won, but knowing it's in Las Vegas, I'm sure they had a friendly wager.

It may take an hour to compose a very simple email with this thing, but you will get a heck of a workout — and it will be impossible to misplace this beast. Despite all logic, I kind of want one for my room.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation’s largest consumer electronics show, check out complete coverage of CES 2013 from PCWorld and TechHive.

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Las Vegas —Are you the type that thinks video games were so much better back in the simpler times, before 3D graphics and realistic settings? Perhaps you're a fan of the Super Nintendo? Hyperkin would like to speak with you.

This is no emulator: this is literally a chip-set of an SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) inside of a handheld gaming device, shaped conveniently like an SNES controller.

If you're tired of the little screen, plug it into your TV with the AV-out port, plug in a classic SNES controller to the front of the Supaboy and enjoy your bite-sized console.

Time to grab your old cartridges from the attic, blow out the dust (that isn't the recommended way to cleaning game cartridges, but you'll do it anyway) and get your retro gaming on.

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Las Vegas—Some of the most intriguing gadgets at CES aren’t actually for sale; they’re prototypes that some wunderkid cobbled together and brought to the Big Show in hopes of catching someone’s eye (and a lucrative business deal.) The Intellect Motion is just such a device, an elaborate motion controller built by a team of medical device engineers for playing fast-paced video games with your entire body.

The prototype works by tracking the movement of a sensor attached to your body with a camera. Lean forward and the Intellect Motion tells the game to move your avatar forward; lean farther and your character moves faster. You can lean left and right to strafe sideways, jump in the air to make your character jump and use the Intellect Motion gun (which is also tracked by the camera) to look around the world and interact as you would your PC mouse. The system supports you with an elaborate body harness so you can bounce back and forth or even jump around without hurting yourself (or innocent bystanders.)

We tested the unit with an open-source first-person shooter game called Xonotic, and the experience of navigating a virtual world is a little disconcerting. Your physical body and your in-game avatar don’t really move in the same way or at the same speed; it’s not like the 1:1 ratio of real-world movement to virtual movement you get when using the Wii MotionPlus controller. It really takes some time to get used to throwing your weight around to move quickly or leaning and then jumping to get your character over in-game obstacles, and you look pretty foolish while you’re learning the ropes. Unfortunately, the only place you might ever find one of these crazy contraptions is in an arcade or other gaming center; you’ll probably never be able to buy an Intellect Motion for home use.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and video from the nation's largest consumer electronics show, check out complete coverage of CES 2013 from PCWorld and TechHive.

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LAS VEGAS—You can build more than you might expect with just a little bit of air flow and two microns of water. Like a virtual touchscreen display that appears out of nowhere. That's what Displair can boast anyway, with one of the more eye-catching demos I saw at CES 2013.

Air flows out of the device, interacting with water drops to form a screen where you can beam images from a computer or tablet. But this is no mere projection screen, it's a fully interactive display, as I found it when I was able to play a game of Fruit Ninja just by waving my hand across the Displair's virtual screen.

Displair's Alexander Chachava touted the device's energy efficiency and eco-friendly features when we talked. And it's certainly cleaner than a regular display. It's kind of hard to leave smudges on a screen made up of air, after all.

Is it practical? It could be, even with a $10,000 price tag, if the company succeeds in its goal of having developers build customized apps that fully take advantage of the gesture controls Displair could support. We'll know more later this year when the Displair is slated to arrive by the second quarter of 2013.

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LAS VEGAS—You didn't have to walk very far on the showfloor at CES 2013 before you ran into someone who wanted to do some very serious damage to your smartphone.

Tech21 was ready to take a mallet to your phone. At the G-Form booth, death by bowling ball was the order of the day. And steer clear of the Invisible Phone Guard booth unless you've always wanted to see a phone used as a makeshift cutting board.

Protection was very much on the mind of CES exhibitors this year—and not just when it comes to cases. (Though as always, plenty of vendors could be found hawking assorted sleeves, snapcases, and other gear for stashing your smartphone.) Instead, third-party suppliers and even a few device makers want to make your devices more durable before they ever wind up in your hands.

"Handheld electronics have become such an integral part for everyone," said Felipe Pimineto of Drywired, which was showing off its nano-coating technology to protect mobile devices from accidents and spills. "Anything one can do to protect these devices, it's worth looking into." That meant companies like DryWired, Liquipel, and several others could be found around CES showcase technology that protects phones, tablets, and other gadgets from water damage.

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There's been a virtual stampede of five-inch smartphones unleashed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, but a new device launched by Australian Kogan sets itself apart with dual-SIM capabilities and a particularly compelling price.

Priced at just A$149, or about US$158, the Agora Android  phone will begin shipping in mid-February.

"Up until now, full feature smartphones have only been for the rich,” said Ruslan Kogan, the company's founder and CEO. “We want to make technology more affordable for everyone.”

A 1GHz dual-core Cortex A9 processor

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LAS VEGAS—Getting sound into a computer is tricky and making things sound good is really hard. Neither of those things used to matter much if you weren’t a professional musician or broadcaster, but these days you can’t spit without hitting someone with their own podcast (that or making the rounds as a podcast guest). Between podcasts, Skype, and videoconferencing, dedicated microphones are relevant to far more people than ever before.

Blue Microphones

At CES, Blue Microphones added another mic to its already impressive array of products. The $100 Nessie is designed for people who want good sound without a lot of effort. The USB-connected device comes with a built-in pop filter to smooth out those plosive popping “p” sounds; an internal shockmount; and a bunch of onboard processing including a de-esser, EQ, and level control. If you’re someone with no audio skills at all—and no interest in obtaining them—the Nessie is meant to be as foolproof as possible.

The mic itself looks cool, with a long Loch Ness Monster-style neck that inspired its name, though its light plastic body felt much cheaper than Blue’s $150 Yeti model. There are three recording modes—one for voice, one for instruments, and one that turns off all the audio processing (just in case you ended up obtaining those audio skills after all). It’s got a headphone jack—key for monitoring your own audio—and both a volume control and a mute button right on the device.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if your car could valet itself? That’s right—imagine driving up to a hotel or restaurant, getting out of your car, and pressing a button. Your car would roll up its windows and drive off to find an available parking spot and park itself. Then, when you needed your car again, you could just press another button and it would leave its parking space and drive to where you are.

Automakers are already working on this type of less-intense automated driving. Audi’s proof-of-concept car isn’t quite Google’s self-driving vehicle—there’s no LIDAR laser on the roof, and it can’t drive hundreds of thousands of miles without human interaction (yet). But this car can drive itself into a parking lot, park itself, and drive back out to meet you with the press of a smartphone button.

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