Last week at CES I caught up with the guys and gals at Invisible SHIELD,an incredibly strong and flexible transparent film. The film was originally intended to protect helicopter blades, but is now available to protect your gadgets . They gave me a demo of the product with the PC Mag cameras rolling.

This week I ordered one and immediately applied it to my Blackberry Pearl. I'll briefly walk you through the process of applying it to your phone, but bottom line it's a royal pain in the arse. Don't get me wrong, it's totally worth the trouble, but block out a good hour of time trying to apply it. They also recommend not turning on your device for 24 hours, stating, "this time allows the shield to 'set up' properly." I turned it on 5 mins after I was done. No one died.

I've yet to give it a good drop, but after a week of use, The Invisible SHEILD hasn't let a scratch through and adds no bulk, the only area not covered by the shield is the keyboard, volume keys, headphone jack, etc.

Images of the trying process, after the jump.

Post by PJ Jacobowitz

There's no such thing as bad press, right? Well, not if you're a relatively unknown tech company.

Gizmodo's little CES prank may have backfired on the gadget blog by getting at least one of its writers banned from future CEA events. But that's not going to stop the maker of TV-B-Gone, the device that enabled Gizmodo's shenanigans, from exploiting it--and why should it? In all honesty, it's hard to imagine too many applications for the product beyond prankery. It just turns TVs on and off.

The company dropped a press release for the product in my inbox this morning, with a letterhead, that reads in part:

Amid the stir Gizmodo bloggers caused by switching-off presentations at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, you may have heard of TV-B-Gone--the discreet device that controls the power setting of 90% of all TVs. While the prank was controversial, what is now indisputable is that the TV-B-Gone works effectively to empower users to manage TVs in their environment.

Largely negative though the whole event may be, this has proven a pretty good press week for a company with a name like Cornfield Electronics. Let's just hope that, for its sake, it don't hold any press conferences in the near future.

When I collected my CES badge this year, I noticed a peculiar thing--the cloth holster was white rather than the bright-red that was being handed out to my PC Magazine colleagues. Across the top, where theirs read "Press," mine said "Blogger." I looked at the thing for a second, and then simply went on. Fair enough; PC Magazine issues my paychecks, but my primary responsibilities are, in fact, those of a blogger.

Then I stood in line with my coworkers to pick up my CES-branded swag bag. When I got up front, the man behind the counter looked at my badge and said, "We don't have the blogger bag today. Come back tomorrow."

On a whole, though, the differences between Blogger and Press credentials were largely negligible, but they were still there. We had the badges to prove it.

Is it possible to cram all of CES into one long, bulleted blog post? Of course not, but what kind of gadget blog would we be if we didn't regularly attempt the impossible--or at the very least, provide a robust retrospective of our show coverage?

After the jump, we take a look at the best, worst, and most patently absurd moments from Gearlog's coverage of CES 2008.

I must admit, part of the fun of going to Vegas for CES is, um, being in Vegas. Monorails, breakfast buffets, themed hotels, a trip to the Hooters casino, the excitement begins from the first nickel you drop into the slot machine at the Las Vegas airport and doesn't let up until the groggy five hour plane ride on the way home.

A day after getting back to New York City, it was a bit of a downer to be greeted by this MSNBC story questioning whether Vegas would continue to be the home for future consumer electronic shows. The key factors that are throwing the future setting of the world's biggest technology show up for debate are the rising costs of food, beverages, and hotel rooms. (After being forced to feed my habit with $3 bottles of Diet Pepsi, I can't say I'm qualified to offer a debate on that front.)

"We've heard from our attendees, from our exhibitors ... that the rates of hotels during the International CES are increasing out of proportion from what they think it should be," CEA spokesman, Jason Oxman said. The question then is: What other major American city might possess the infrastructure to house future Consumer Electronic Shows? For the answer, we spoke with someone who knows a thing or two about such subjects, vice president of our Event Marketing Group, Paul O'Reilly.

CES 2008 did have its share of robots, including these two. The first is a prototype from WowWee (which introduced a bunch of other robots at the show). It's the sexy Femisapien. The second is a helper bot from Fujitsu. Enjoy the video.

The Fun 50 is an incredibly cool little handheld microscope from Taiwan-based T-Plan. The device's 640-by-480 VGA TFT screen displays objects magnified at five to 20 times their normal size.

T-Plan's microscope can be used as a standalone device or plugged into your PC via USB, so you can check out the action on the big screen. The Fun 50 is able to capture still images of magnified devices and also features a dual display mode, so you can compare captured images to the objects you're currently viewing.

The company recommends the Fun 50 for medical observation, manufacturing, electrical work, jewelry repair, and anti-counterfeiting, though we're sure that if you're creative enough, you can think of a few more interesting uses of your own.

Korean audio manufacturer FILS makes thin speakers. Really thin. The faces of the speakers are made of a film called poly vinylidene fluoride (PVDF), "plezo film" for short. Plezo film is lightweight and can be bent into various shapes--like, say, the sails of a miniature yacht.

The FILS representative that I spoke with, Yun Gun-Young, told me that the simply-named Yacht Type Film Speaker is a big hit among executives in Europe and Central Asia, who apparently like to show off their income via novelty audio equipment.

The film doesn't do so well with lows, though, so the woofer is built into the base of the boat.

The company makes speakers in a slew of other styles too, but none quite so exciting as the sailboat. No word on availability in the U.S., but if you really want to live like a Central Asian executive, price should be no concern.

Of all of the trends in the International Hall at CES, one of the most prevalent and perhaps least surprising was the sheer volume of iPod knockoffs. I saw a lot of fascinating innovation too, but it was tough not to be distracted by the amount of engineering work that is going into the creation of copyright-infringing discount-electronic-store fodder.

Those looking for the next oPod or iPid will find a choice selection of devices after the jump.

This was my first CES ever, and I'm probably a bit biased given who sends me paychecks, but I have to say that PC Magazine really knows how to throw a party. We celebrated our first quarter-century of existence by hosting a bash at the MGM Grand's Tabu room.

Things went swimmingly. There were open alcohol and oxygen bars, three generations of PC Mag editors in chief [pictured above: Jim Louderback, Lance Ulanoff, and Michael MIller], and a cameo appearance by former Red Sox pitcher and current blogger Curt Schilling. Oh, and don't get me started about all the tabletop dancing.

In case you didn't have the chance to come out to Vegas this year or found yourself on the other side of our geeky velvet rope, check out more pics after the jump. And to everyone who did show up, thanks for helping us blow out the candles on our twenty-fifth.

As the need for sustainable forms of energy becomes more urgent, tech companies are working harder to devise creative ways to incorporate efficient methods of consumption into their gadgets. One recent concept is the solar-powered backpack, which powers your portable electronics and also lets you lug them around.

The key to the success of the product is that it serves a function, while advertising the wearer's love for the environment. The solar panels on the backpack are prominently displayed, though at least somewhat subtle.

Solar power was a popular theme in the International room at this year's CES--and concepts of subtlety fluctuate a good deal from culture to culture. Take, for example, these gadget-charging devices from Chinese company Blueline. Its products don't seem to have much (if any) representation in the States, and until some fashion-plate celebrity deems it cool to risk his or her reputation and neck muscles with the baseball cap at left, it will likely stay like that for now

I should also note for the record that this picture doesn't quite give the scope of the hat. It broke while being shipped from China. The panel should actually stand up straight, for full environmental hipness.

Yup, that's right: we now have photos of both me and my sister on Gearlog at the moment. I am modeling the stylish "Audio Bone," a product that really needs to have its name changed when it finally comes here from Japan. The Audio Bone is really weird - it's a pair of bone conduction headphones. You don't actually put them over your ears - you put them on your upper jawbone right in front of your ear, and they transmit music through your skull. Bone conduction typically hasn't delivered very good sound quality, but these headphones sounded pretty decent, though they felt quite odd - my whole head was vibrating!

Along with the basic Audio Bone, Japanese firm Goldendance had a waterproof model - the Audio Bone Aqua. That one is even more interesting, because bone conduction just might let you listen to music underwater where standard headphones don't work well.

The Audio Bone costs $120 and the Aqua costs $90, but Goldendance doesn't have a US distributor yet.

I came upon them a little late for my Bluetooth story, but Ubixion had a brand-new technology at their booth at CES: a pendant-style stereo Bluetooth headset with a MEMS display. The MEMS displays, developed by Qualcomm, offer extremely low power consumption and unusually good visibility in sunlight. The Lubix PH2 will be available under the Acoustic Research brand this month, for around $90.

Ubixion also was showing their new Lubix NC2, a stereo Bluetooth headset with a fashion-oriented design which you dangle around your neck as a piece of jewelry. It's certainly striking - it doesn't look like a headset at all when it's on the necklace, unlike, say, the Jabra JX20, which looks like a headset on a necklace. The NC2 will be available by June for around $80.

Okay, full disclosure first. The attractive, enthusiastic marketing lady demonstrating the PhoneLabs Unity Phone at CES 2008 is my sister, Leila Mack. But she doesn't actually work for PhoneLabs - she's just helping out at the convention - so it's not totally corrupt for me to talk about the Unity.

PhoneLabs' new desk phone, which sells for $249, is a two-line model that can hook up to any combination of land lines and cell phones. If you link it to a cell phone - either via a wire or Bluetooth - it can absorb the cell phone's phone book, so you don't have to keep turning to the cell phone to remember people's numbers. You can check out your cell phone's call log and redial list on the Unity, too. It can send and receive SMS messages and can even do push-to-talk through your cell phone, by hitting the "Call Waiting" button.

The Unity is available now.

There were several surprises at UTStarcom's booth at CES this year, most notably this text-centric phone. The previously unannounced TXT 8010 is a dual-band CDMA phone with BREW, a VGA camera, and MicroSD removable memory. It has a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from below its 2.2" screen. UTStarcom provides a lot of phones to smaller, more youth-oriented CDMA carriers like Cricket, MetroPCS and Virgin, as well as some Sprint and Verizon phones, but I expect this phone to show up on regional or smaller carriers.

UTStarcom also had the only full array of phones on the AWS frequency band at the show. AWS is going to be used by T-Mobile for 3G, but also by Cricket and MetroPCS for expanding their coverage, and the low-end CDMA AWS phones UTStarcom has looked like they were custom-made for the Cricket/MetroPCS crowd. I'm not going to list UTStarcom's various low-end models here - frankly, these are the kinds of phones people pick up because they're free with contract - but if you're curious, click over to Phone Scoop for a more in-depth rundown of those devices.