A few times a year, Pepcom comes to New York and throws a media-only bash, with lots of vendors showing their technology products -- mostly consumer stuff, some enterprise too. A whole herd of PC Magazine folks headed over to this one, which featured a barbecue-in-the-city theme. These events are a good place to get some hands-on experience with products you've heard about but not seen yet; to discover a few new companies with innovative products; to catch up with friends and colleagues; to eat a lot of free food; and for one brave urban cowboy, to have a go on the mechanical bull (left).

After I polished off a plate of pulled pork, I took a walk around the show floor. A few things stood out to me: Sony Ericsson had some very appealing speaker docks for their walkman phones, which we'll post about here later when we get our hands on them. ScreenTek (new to me) offers replacement screens for laptops, which they claim are easy to install. Belkin has a new surge protector coming out (OK, I get excited about surge protectors... so what!) that look a whole lot better than the ones I have in every outlet in my apartment; again, we'll post about that when we try it out for ourselves. And Western Digital showed a cool-looking personal hard drive called My Book Premium Edition; it comes in capacities of 160GB to 500GB, the latter costing $329.99. Check out the blue capacity gauge on the front of the drive -- nifty!

There was a lot more to see at Digital Experience: BBQ Edition, but PCMag Web producer Molly McLaughlin worked a lot harder than I did to show you. She put up a great slideshow of standout products at pcmag.com; take a look.