At a show where the focus is more often about making devices skinnier, faster and bigger, blind music icon Stevie Wonder came to the Consumer Electronics Show with a more personal agenda: To convince electronics vendors to keep himself and other blind people in mind when designing the latest gadgets.

“One thing that’s always puzzled me is how I can have access to some of those great technologies,” he said in Las Vegas. “Our desire has been to be part of these technologies and be more independent.”

The musician, who uses a BlackBerry, said he was also happy to now be able to use an iPod (the nano can provide speech options that help navigation without vision). But he still had a wishlist of devices he would like to be able to operate by himself including a car, which he acknowledged could be tricky and a satellite radio, which should be less tricky.

Wonder appeared with other advocates for the blind who bemoaned the proliferation of touchscreen controls on devices as they are difficult for blind consumers to use.

Mike May, President of GPS maker Sendero Group, summed up his frustration saying that while he and other blind people had managed to overcome incredible challenges, difficulties with touchscreens seemed insurmountable.

“Ski 60 miles an hour downhill? Yes. Use a flat panel microwave? No.”

May also cited another blind adventurer saying “Climb Mount Everst? Yes? Use a touchscreen, no.”

Several exhibitors took up the “green” theme at CES 2009 as the “Pre” party continued. Any chance Dell had to upstage Palm disappeared in a cloud of secrecy with the “Adamo” laptop it briefly presented, but gave no details about.

Fuji said its EnviroMAX alkaline batteries were made of more than 90 percent recycled materials, had no mercury, cadmium and were PVC free.

Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies said their “HydroPack” water-activated and portable power system HydroPak could provide 4 to 5 hours of 50 watt emergency power without pollution or noise.

Design conscious Areaware showed off a retro and playful radio called “Magno”, that it said was made in Indonesia with sustainable harvest timber.

And Greenpeace held a press conference praising gadgets by Lenovo, Sharp, Samsung, Nokia and Toshiba in its 2008 Green Electronics Survey.

Intel rolled out the next generation of its netbooks aimed at the education sector and emerging markets. The third generation Classmate PC netbook is actually a netbook tablet, adding a touch screen and powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

Check out this slideshow for a look at some of the shiny new toys in various shades of green and grey featured at CES 2009.

(Photos: Fuji’s EnviroMAX batteries, HydroPack system by Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies)

Were buyers shying away from the Consumer Electronics Show this year or did they just keep a really low profile?

Given the state of retailers — what with consumer electronics sellers like Circuit City filing for bankruptcy protection — it wouldn’t be surprising if they kept away. After all, who’s in the mood for bulk buys of fancy new gadgets when consumers are so tightfisted with their dollars?

There was no International Retail Power Panel, which has featured the CEOs of Best Buy and Circuit City in the past. And the one retail panel advertised on the CES website earlier — International Success Stories from Retail — was also cancelled today, without explanation.

Guess it’s hard to celebrate success in a recession.

A panel at the Consumer Electronics Show, discussing the Feb 17 deadline for a mandatory U.S. switch to a nationwide digital television system, were less than keen on President-Elect Barack Obama’s backing of a proposal for a delay. The idea of postponing was floated amid fears viewers were unprepared and funding problems for a government program to provide $40 coupons for consumers to buy digital-to-analog converters.

“Delaying the transition in my opinion, you’re just delaying the same problems,” said Emily Neilson, president and general manager of KLAS-TV a Las Vegas CBS affiliate who said that about 7 percent of consumers were still not ready for the change over. She said that while the transfer was not likely to go perfectly, the problems would eventually be ironed out. “I think most of the people waiting on the coupons don’t need the $40 and I’d like to give those to the people who truly need it,” she said.

Henry Hauser, a display product manager for television maker Panasonic said it did not make sense to delay and that the transition would only see isolated snafus. “We feel it would be better to just end the confusion. People are going to delay until they don’t have a picture and then they’ll go get it,” he said. “We feel very strongly it should go forward”

But Lynn Mento, senior vice president at AARP, said that the advocacy group for people over 50, effectively supports the delay as it could help them to get more convertor coupons to the people who need them.

“We have been working to try to communicate to our members that if they have coupons to please donate them … The added time would give us more time to get those messages out.”

But she said if there is a day, something should happen on Feb 17th that would remind people they need to make sure their televisions will be able to receive digital TV. “In terms of seasonality we support not having the change in the winter months,” said Mento, who worries about her members having to climb on their rooftops to change their antennas in order to transfer to digital.

Ford CEO Alan Mulally unveiled new features of its voice-command activated in-car system Sync yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, highlighting its connectivity with a driver’s other devices, including cell phones and personal computers.

Mulally then showed off a futuristic dashboard featuring an electronic personal assistant, Eva (for Emotive Voice Activation). In a small video clip of how it could all work, the Eva avatar engaged the driver in conversation and performed tasks like scheduling appointments. It’s the next generation of Ford’s Human Machine Interface (HMI) strategy, Mulally said.

“Everyone is growing up with a connected device and they don’t want to be disconnected,” Mulally told Reuters in a brief interview after his CES keynote address. Ford’s hoping its Sync service, developed with Microsoft and launched 18 months ago, will appeal especially to younger car buyers. Earlier, he’d said his five kids are his “focus group,” often e-mailing him articles about new gadgets and trends from Wired.com and other sites.

“We’re learning to think like an electronics company,” Mulally said.  But even though Mulally might want to bring Detroit closer to Vegas, reporters who thronged him after the keynote hardly let him forget he was an autos guy, and a Big Three CEO at that.

“How did you get to Las Vegas from Detroit?” one reporter asked. “I walked,” Mulally quipped.

TiVo, the small company with the big brand name and tiny marketing budget, has long used CES as a primary showcase for its new products and initiatives.

This year we caught up with CEO Tom Rogers, where he talked about the pace of business discussions at CES, and how the video industry needs to learn from the mistakes of the music industry regarding “responding to strategic challenges.”

Dell Inc on Friday finally took the wraps off its entry into the fast-growing ultra-portable segment, unveiling its new Adamo PC to an assembled crowd of media types.

Well, perhaps unveiled is not exactly the right word. More like a brief, fleeting, passing glance. There was no touching the Adamo, no turning it on, really not much of anything. Instead, a model held the Adamo aloft and moved the PC around in a variety of poses, while reporters craned their necks and did a quick visual calculation, trying to figure out how big its screen size is.

There are really only two things we can say for sure about the Adamo: it is thin and it is the color black. Dell officials refused to divulge even the barest specs, saying only that it is a ” luxury franchise” that will ship in the first half of the year.

The event, held at the Palms hotel in Las Vegas in connection with the Consumer Electronics Show, was obviously designed to cloak the Adamo - which is Latin “to fall in love with” - with a certain mysterious air. In that they may have succeeded.

Palm surprised many and racked up cool points with the introduction of its new mobile phone, the Pre, here at CES. How much Pre will cost at retail, whether Palm can deliver it on time, will Apple eat Palm’s lunch with the next iPhone — all those hugely important questions remain unanswered for now.

So with that in mind, we strolled into Palm’s swanky mood-lit lounge at CES, and recorded bits of the demonstrations of the Pre.

Here’s how the phone takes pictures, with its 3 megapixel camera:

Check out the curved view of the Pre, and the peek-a-boo mirror that pops up: Yes, a viewer at my demo said “The Ladies love that.” O-K…..

Here, we see a demonstration of how Pre manages contacts.

And finally, closing applications is done with the flick of a finger.

The PC emerged as fashion statement in 2008, with a number of companies rolling out models that attempted to appeal to consumers’ sense of style. And few PC offerings generated more buzz than Hewlett-Packard’s Mini 1000 Vivienne Tam edition, designed by the fashionista herself. The slim red netbook, which is meant to evoke a clutch purse, is decorated with peony flowers.

The device, which began shipping this week, is off to a strong start, according to Phil McKinney, chief technology officer of HP’s personal systems group. In an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, McKinney called the Vivienne Tam netbook the “first gender specific PC.”

“It’s still hard to get… I’ve gotten more emails on this product from people outside of HP wanting me to pull strings to get them the product than any other product we’ve ever shipped in the years I’ve been at HP.”

McKinney is adamant that the PC is not a commodity product, and said the Vivienne Tam netbook is tapping “that emotion and passion and that drives brand loyalty.”

He said the notion of marketing to women has changed. The old marketing idea was simply to “pink it and shrink it. And that’s not being authentic, women will pick up on that in a heartbeat.”

Most of all, a device must pass the ease-of-use test, or women will reject is much faster than men, McKinney said.

Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers is in Las Vegas again for the Consumer Electronics Show, where he unveiled products including a wireless audio hub for the home and promised new consumer product announcements as often as every two months from now on.

Chambers said he didn’t plan to bet in Sin City, except perhaps a little BlackJack, though you could call Cisco’s entry into the consumer electronics market a bit of a gamble.

The technology industry veteran took a moment to answer some questions from Reuters at a Cisco drinks reception at the show. We asked him if Cisco will come out with portable devices small enough to put in your pocket?

Yes, but only if we can maintain a sustainable differentiation … Only if it has a tie-in to the network and it can voice data and video applications (and not necessarily with all of those combined into one device).

If I would have told you I would have business phones wired and wireless, you would have said no way. Yet we do have the number one play in all business phones.”

(Photo: Reuters)