I totally wanted to hug this little hug machine! Also, it has a hole in its mouth to allow for the insertion of a charger but, and this is only for those so inclined, I could imagine some other potentially illegal uses for said hole. Just saying.

Video after the jump.

Man, I saw these back at PAX but for some reason never brought them up. Which is too bad, because they’re pretty cool. I love the little in-line remote that lets you control the volume for individual surround channels. They sounded good back at PAX, but as I note in the video, there were a ton of dudes around when I was there so I didn’t try them on again.

They’re gonna have a ton of different styles for these things, which usually I don’t care too much for, but these different colors and patterns were pretty awesome. I took pictures of a bunch but I don’t know just how many there will be total.

Did I call it or what? This is, at the moment, the first and only mobile phone with TI’s DLP pico projector technology. It will ship later this month in Korea but we’ll have to wait until later this year to see if Samsung decides to ship it Stateside. As you’ll see in the video the device is capable of projecting all sorts of content at a decent resolution. Rather than blabbing on about it, I’ll let you folks check out the video.

Hey! Memorize Every Wonderful Moment With AEE Cool Recording Gadget! It is Very Small. It Support USB 2.0. It only 55mm tall! It has LED Indicator. You Can Mount It Anywhere. But the Absolutely Best Thing About it?

IOGEAR announced a wireless USB audio/video adapter today. Seems like it could be interesting.

So these things are basically headphones designed to output up to and only up to 85 decibels. You plug them in and no matter how high the device is set, your child will be listening at a level safe enough for everyday use and that won’t damage their hearing accidentally.

CES is filled with gadgets and gizmos that are known about months ahead of time and so the real jewels are the booths from previously unknown companies. Case in point is Touch Revolution and its sweet NIMble platform that is ran by *gasp* Android.

Well, maybe not the biggest ever (Tekken on IMAX!) or the most original, but with all its chromoly-steel construction and tubey good looks, I just had to put it up. I’d like bigger screens, personally, and they were playing a kind of lackluster racer, but the device itself was cool. The wheel is Logitech and the pedals… I’m not sure, but there were three and they were big and metal, so it doesn’t matter what brand. If I’m ever super rich, I’ll get one of these instead of a real nice car. You can check them out at Simcraft.com.

Video inside.

I’ll admit that I’m a cranky bastard at these shows. You guys have essentially entrusted us with the difficult and thankless job of allowing you to subjugate your neophilia through frequent and effusive discussions of new technology and we, in turn, have become jaded, angry, and bitter. Why? Because doing this stuff is hard work. It requires constant attention, the ability to write intelligently with as few typos as possible (obviously, we fail on that front often), and an eye for the new. We’re really trying and we want to make you guys happy. But sometimes we get angry and snarky and annoyed.

Now here’s something that will end up at the bottom of the toybox next Christmas. The Mindflex lets you control a floating ball around a little obstacle course. Air bumps and pops the ball through hoops and tubes and ends up frustrating you more than anything else.

HP finally came clean on its Firebird midsize gaming rig and we just spent a few minutes with the liquid-cooled machine. It seems that HP had the traveling gamer in mind as it’s light enough to lug between LAN parties thanks to its laptop components. But don’t forget that Gideon Bible-sized power brick. Overall though, it’s a hot little rig that’s sure to make all the nerdy LAN chicks giddy.

We’ll be meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada tonight at 9pm at the Casino Royale hotel. If you’re in Las Vegas and want to come by for a little bit of camaraderie and drinkie drinkie. You should just look for a bunch of drunk fat people but I’ll tweet our actual location around 9pm.

Last night Greg Kumparak and I had the pleasure of interviewing the Dr. Dre of NWA fame. Jimmy Iovine from Interscope, Noel and Kevin Lee from Monster were also present. Our video isn’t quite finished yet, but we’ll have it up soon. We asked Dre a couple questions like what his favorite gadgets were, what he thought of DRM and what he’s working on now. But you’ll have to wait for the interview. In the meantime enjoy a few shots of some prototype brushed aluminum Beats over-the-ears.

Here’s a little demo of the SanDisk Sansa slotRadio player that we reported earlier. The basic gist is a $99 player loaded up with 1000 songs spanning various genres. You can also buy genre-specific microSD cards for $39.99 that come with 1000 songs too

The Asus Core i7-powered ROG was all by itself at the CES Asus booth but for good reason. This thing is a F’n beast! It’s massive and must weigh a metric ton. The Asus booth monkey wouldn’t open the case for some reason despite my persistent asking and joking. Even still, it’s a gigantic, massive, huge, gaming machine that probably has it’s own weather climate.

That great watch/phone we saw a few weeks back is here at CES. I got my hands on it last night but they made me turn off the video for some secret screens that nobody can see. Still, it’s all there on video and it looks great. The light was really awful, though. We’ll have more later, of course. Click on through for the vids.

Hmmm. CES Box lunch. Hopefully the Big Daddy Roast Beef tastes as good as it sounds…

At a press announcement today at CES, Palm announced a brand spankin’ new handset: the Palm Pre. Running the much-gossiped new Palm WebOS (Not known as “Nova” afterall) and sporting a QWERTY slide-out keyboard below a 3.1″ touchscreen, this might just be enough to get Palm out of their slump.

Netbook, notebook, call it whatever you want — the MSI X320 is slick city, my main man. Here’s a hands-on video and some photos of the device, plus info about pricing and availability.

CrunchGear is live at CES 2009 attending the Palm keynote. What can we expect? New hardware, a new OS, and potentially a branding strategy that will move them far from everything we used to know about Palm.

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