While there were plenty of gorgeous high-tech devices on display that will be hitting store shelves in the next few months, the most impressive displays (at least as far as we were concerned) were for products that are still a year or two out from being available to the general public. Every major CE manufacturer had forward-looking designs and products in evidence that were almost enough to make us chuck our suddenly out-of-date digital gewgaws in the garbage.

We sat down with several folks from Philips Components, the design arm of Philips Electronics. The mixed crowd (half Dutch, half American) presented us with several designs for Bluetooth-equipped wireless devices that they were creating for OEM partners. We were shown wireless Bluetooth speakers that could pick up a music feed from just about anywhere in the house, a miniature phone headset that was straight out of the future, two notebook PCs playing Unreal over a wireless network and a thin Bluetooth monitor that picked up DVD movies from a remote DVD player. Most impressive was an LCD web pad, the Net Display Module, which was about the length, width and thickness of a magazine. This device, which was less than half an inch thick, had a brilliant touch-screen LCD panel, which pulled information from a separate unit. By placing the CD-ROM, processor and Internet connection in a separate device, the pad was kept unbelievably slim. A web pad like this would be perfect for walking around the house or office, surfing the web, reading email or taking notes on the fly without having to be shackled to a desk or boxy computer. Philips Components will be able to produce pads like this in many configurations (including Transmeta Crusoe chips with embedded Linux) for OEM partners. No design wins had been announced at the show, but Philips Electronics is (naturally) a big customer for Philips Components.

Pioneer and Sharp were breaking impressive ground in terms of small, low-cost, low-power color displays. Both companies were showing off examples of Organic Electroluminescent (or OEL) displays, ranging in size from postage stamps to car radio screens to portable DVD player screens. Like those crazy neon space fish that live at the bottom of the sea, OEL screens give off their own light, as opposed to LCD screens that need to have light bounced off or passed through. The colors given off by the screen were amazingly sharp and vivid. OEL screens use very little power -- Pioneer showed us a glowing green logo about the size of a matchbook that had been running for two months straight on a watch battery -- and operate even better under cold conditions. Pioneer had a few OEL-display car stereo faceplates that could display moving or still images that could be loaded onto the faceplate by a car stereo dealer, while Sharp was demoing prototypes of OEL gizmos ranging from the size of a Game Boy to a four-inch video screen. Check out this movie to see more OEL.

The impact of MP3 and digital music continues to be felt throughout the CE industry. If you don't have a digital music player out now or on the drawing boards, you're obviously no longer a player. Most of the big car stereo manufacturers are rapidly shuffling MP3 into their product mix, as well. Car stereo MP3 players were very much in evidence throughout the show, as the CE guys attempted to jump into the game. The coolest MP3 car project we were privy to at this year's CES was Pioneer's HDD-DEH prototype, a concept so cool that they have yet to even slap a cool name on it. The HDD-DEH is a combo unit, part in-dash controller and part separate modular unit meant for placement in a trunk or underneath a seat. The HDD-DEH has a hard drive and a memory stick reader, which the HDD-DEH uses to read, record, store and play digital music files. Since it uses Sony's Memory Stick, there's obviously the ability to move your MP3 files from your portable device to your car system and back again with ease. The HDD-DEH is also able to record music from the radio (or satellite radio) directly to its own hard drive or output it to the Memory Stick.