One of the coolest geek aspects of Vegas living is the annual Consumer Electronics Show. CES is the biggest conference in the world and it’s a huge showcase of the latest software, hardware and geek gadgets. They have it at the Las Vegas Convention Center (right across the street from me) and it’s completely free.

CES is huge! We were there for a half-day and didn’t make it out of the main hall. It’s literally like entering a city. They use the entire Las Vegas convention center which I believe is the biggest in the world. Plus they use every conference room in the attached Hilton and this year, they spilled over into the Venetian as well. Every hotel in town ends up hosting facilities for some electronics niche.

Walking around the convention is exciting. It’s an electronics convention so there are huge flat-panel TVs everywhere. There are stages with mock-gameshows being played and prizes being given out. Bill Gates and Michael Dell are walking around checking stuff out (didn’t see them though).

One company had a mechanical bull set up being ridden by scantily clad models (this is where the term “booth babe” was coined after all). And why just show off your cool automotive gadget when you can show off a pimped-out car with your gadget installed?

So I took a quick look around to see if there was anything wealth managers would find interesting. I actually found quite a few things; and I saw some big trends that you should know about.

Tiny Little LCD Projectors

I saw tiny LCD projectors no bigger than a paperback novel. They run on AA batteries and can project at 800×600 resolution. Stick one in your laptop bag and you can have an instant client presentation without lugging a second bag around.

Prediction - It won’t be too much longer before laptops have LCD projectors built in.

Earhugger Powerpod

This is a great idea–a charger for your phone that works with any cell phone and can be plugged into the wall, a laptop, or a car, and (believe it or not) a 9-volt battery! When I travel with my fiance, we take four different chargers with us. A wall charger and car charger for my phone, and one each for hers too. Now we can replace all four with the PowerPod from EarHugger. They also make one for the iPod.

Sony Blue-ray versus HD-DVD

Just a tip if you’re buying a hi-def DVD player. The buzz at the conference was that HD-DVD is going beat out Blue-ray to be the industry standard. We saw way more HD-DVD players than Blue-ray. It was also recently announced that the big porn companies have standardized on HD-DVD. It sounds silly, but apparently that’s one of the major things that caused VHS to replace BetaMax as the standard years ago.

Also, HD TVs were everywhere. Panasonic had 1080p vs 720p televisions set up right next to each other to show you how much better the 1080p was. I couldn’t tell the difference. Incidentally, you haven’t seen TV until you’ve seen a couple million dollars worth of 103″ plasmas getting thrown around on rotating electronic arms while playing a cross-screen demo.

WiMAX

Supposedly 2007 is the year we’re going to start seeing WiMAX. WiMAX is going to replace the “last mile” of cable to your home/office. It will eliminate your T-1 or DSL line. From a cost standpoint if nothing else, you should be eagerly ancicipating getting WiMAX in your area.

At CES, Sprint announced a 4-city launch of mobile WiMAX. Baltimore, Chicago, Washington D.C, and one other mystery city–Vegas, possibly? They were showing off the capabilities and, at least for a while, had WiMax up and running for conference attendees. I saw some laptops set up but, since it’s not usually available in Vegas, it didn’t actually occur to me that it might be hooked up. So I didn’t try it.

Big, Cheap LCD Monitors

LCD monitors keep getting bigger and bigger. If you don’t have two monitors yet, then go buy a second one. Windows XP and Vista both handle two monitors without any hassle. I added a second monitor a few years ago and it’s the biggest single productivity-booster I’ve ever had.

I’m not sure when they got so cheap, but you can get a 20″ LCD panel for less than $250. Heck, buy four!

Microsoft Media Center

I can’t see a real use for advisors but I should point out Microsoft Media Center was everywhere. Microsoft and Apple are fighting over who owns your living room. Media Center dominated CES–it seemed like every other booth was running some flavor of Media Center. Of course, I think Apple passed on CES this year, and actually had their own MacWorld conference at the same time, forcing attendees to choose between one or the other.

Microsoft’s concept is built around a Media Center PC hub. This is where you store all your recorded TV shows, downloaded music and family photos. It’s a Tivo on steroids.

At each one of your TVs, you hook up a Media Center Extender. This can be a stand-alone unit or it can be something like an X-Box 360. These Extenders talk to your central Media Center PC and can play all your TV shows, movies, albums. They can show slide shows of all your digital pictures. Typically they connect through your wireless network so there are no cables to be installed.

In addition to the TV, you can take your media with you with the new Microsoft Zune. A Zune is the same thing as an iPod but it hooks into Microsoft’s entertainment infrastructure. I’d heard a lot of bad things about the Zune before I got to CES but was actually impressed once I saw one. They have bigger video screens then the iPods and were just as fun to play with.

We also saw tiny little portable TV units that are designed to carry your media around. These are bigger than the Zune and are actually small computers. They’re incredibly expensive. Here’s one hooked up to a keyboard and TV. Look at the unit in the lower-right to see how big they really are.

Microsoft’s solution is pretty slick. Apple just rolled out Apple iTV (their version of a Media Extender). It attaches to your TV and talks to iTunes similar to the way Microsoft’s Media Extenders work. But Apple’s a few years behind. In fact, I’d call this fight for Microsoft right now if it wasn’t for one other thing–the Apple iPhone.

Apple iPhone

The Apple iPhone is possibly the coolest product I’ve ever seen demoed. I won’t go into details, but Apple has been working on this for three years and seems to have fixed everything that you never knew was wrong with your cell phone.

I’ll give you an example. Anybody who has ever left me a message knows I don’t respond quickly to voice mail. Heck, sometimes I don’t even respond at all. I hate the process of calling my voice mail box, having to go through a minute-long transaction that includes navigating the menus, punching in my password, and then struggling to write down a message while using my shoulder to keep the phone close enough to my ear to hear the message. Then having to rewind the message three times to make sure I got the phone number right. Then you have to hang up, and re-type the phone number you just wrote down just to do a call-back.

To make this worse, you have to listen to the messages sequentially. So if your first message is important and you hang up to call them back, then you have to go through the same process all over again, including re-listening to the first message before you can delete it and get to the next message. Don’t even get me started on skipping messages. Then you have to deal with listening to your saved messages that your provider wants to delete because they’re taking up space on their system, plus re-listening to any skipped messages before you can get to your voice mail. What a pain in the a$$.

Well Apple fixed this mess with something called Visual Voicemail. Now you get a list of all your voice mails on the phone, with the name of each person who left the message. You can immediately listen to the message, call the person back or delete the message. No calling your voice mail. No passwords. No listening to messages sequentially. No writing anything down. Finally!

This is just one example of major across-the-board improvements they’ve made. I can’t wait to get one.