COMMENT: Our five top CES gadgets

CES 2009: Stuart Miles picks his favourites of the show

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13 January 2009 11:48 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Now the dust has finally settled on the announcements at this year's CES in Las Vegas, what were our favourites? Here are our top five gadgets to look out for in the months ahead:

Palm Pre mobile phone
Virtually written off as a company, Palm managed to a surprise everyone at CES with the announcement of a new smartphone and new platform for its phones moving forward. The Palm Pre, as it will be called, is due out in the second half of 2009 in the UK and should, based on what we've seen, be one to challenge the likes of the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and T-Mobile G1 in the touch screen arena. A simple menu interface, qwerty keyboard, and some clever features including wireless charging makes this one of our best of show devices.

Novint Falcon pistol grip games controller
Games developers are constantly trying to immerse us into the games, but what about how we control them? Novint Falcon's approach is to give us a force feed back pistol that you use to control your eye and gun movement in first person shooters. The gun recoils as you shoot and yes you will get tired holding a pistol out at arms length. The accessory works with all Valve games (Orange Box etc) with EA titles supposedly getting support soon. This really will make your first person shooter experience something to remember.

Casio EX-FC100 digital camera
We liked, but didn't love the Casio EX-F1 and EX-FH20 mainly due to their size. At the show all that changed with the announcement that Casio has worked out how to put the same technology into their compact cameras. The 9-megapixel camera with 5x optical zoom will offer the ability to capture 30 frames per second and super fast video capabilities. We love the "Slow" button that slows down real life so you can get that image you know is coming (think blowing out a birthday cake).

Sony Vaio P series laptop
When's a netbook not a netbook? When it's a Sony netbook of course. It might be small, it might run an Intel Atom chip, but that's about the only connection the new Vaio has to the netbook category. Running Windows Vista (or Windows 7 under beta) the new 8-inch screen sized ultra portable laptop from Sony will weigh in at 640g, the catch however is that the top of the range model will set you back £1345, a far cry from the £200 Asus will charge you for the Eee.

Samsung Luxia LED TV
There were plenty of televisions at CES this year from the likes of Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony, LG and Samsung. 3DTV's where the talking point of the future, however of the ones that are going to be actually available in 2009 rather than 2019, the new Samsung Luxia LED TVs impressed us the most. The 8000 series boasts virtually every acronym you can imagine; 1080p, 240Hz, internet ready, 1-inch thick, sizes up to 55-inches, oh and a good picture too boot.