Tom Hanks and Sony CEO Howard Stringer might just have gained a little street cred with the tech crowd this week.

Onstage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the pair of old buddies bantered, aimed gentle jibes at each other and got an appreciative audience rolling in their seats.

Hanks — displaying the same comedic flair he showed in “Big” — insisted he was here because it was written into his contract for starring in the upcoming, Sony-distributed “Angels and Demons”.

The two-time best actor Oscar winner marched in exaggerated fashion around the stage in clear response to a teleprompter, pretended he wished he were anywhere else but in Sin City, then made a raucous exit pleading with Stringer to rescue him from the Samsung and Casio “hellholes”.

“Everywhere in this world I turn, I see the name Sony Sony Sony Sony,” Hanks read off a teleprompter, grimacing as though the obvious corporate plug galled him inwardly. “I show up on the set and there it is on the camera: Sony.” He paused. “Really? I have yet to see that,” he deadpanned.

For his part, Stringer — a former documentary film maker — took Hanks’ antics in stride, accompanied by a stream of near-ceaseless laughter from the crowd. “I took a risk. It failed,” the more somber Stringer told the audience. “But we’ll still be friends.”

Despite the fun and games, CES felt a little forlorn this week. Following Hanks in rapid succession at Stringer’s keynote event was R&B star Usher and baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, but that nearly rounded up celebrity sightings at the once-extravagant, glitzy show. Motown icon Stevie Wonder showed up to promote technology development for the blind, while recording star Akon was on hand to promote his newly released album — on a memory card.

Perhaps unintentionally referencing his inner thoughts, Hanks said at the end of his struggle with the teleprompter: “I should have read this before I came out.”

Video courtesy of YouTube:

I stepped out of the Las Vegas Convention Center yesterday to recover from the brilliant glare of the gazillion TVs on display inside — only to run into another set of boxes on the sidewalk. Okay, they weren’t regular old TVs, but humans wearing black boxes over their heads.

Their heads emblazoned with the logos of TV companies, these “TV zombies” were out on the street taking a break from their first CES protest. Jeffrey Jacoby, one of the zombies, explained that they were members of the Electronics Takeback Coalition, which was demonstrating against the poor gadget recycling practices of consumer electronics manufacturers like LG, Toshiba, Sony and others.

“We’re calling on manufacturers of TVs at CES to take back old products and keep toxic e-waste from coming to haunt us,” said Jacoby, who was dressed in rags and had on white face paint. The Dallas resident works for an environmental non-profit group and came to Vegas along with nearly 40 other people, just to protest.

Earlier in the day, the group organized a press conference and an official 25-zombie demonstration. (You can watch the TV zombies in action in this “Revenge of the Return of the Undead Toxic Televisions” video here.) They’re campaigning for a national recycling program from TV manufacturers ahead of the Feb 17, 2009 digital TV transition,  when “millions of (analog) TVs will become obsolete,” according to the website.

Maybe it’ll be a less uphill task this year to convince CES exhibitors that taking back old TVs isn’t such a bad thing, given how much they’re touting their new energy-saving TVs, recyclable packaging and general all-round environmental friendliness.

The official start of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas saw PDA pioneer Palm unveiling its answer to the popular iPhone smartphone and a new, Web-oriented operating system. Investors pushed the stock up 30 percent for two consecutive days and bloggers affirmed their optimism in early hands-on reviews.

Gizmodo’s Adrian Covert admired the Palm Pre’s intuitive design and “beautiful” screen. And Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky found switching between applications graceful and simple.

Elsewhere in Vegas, Sony continued blazing the organic light-emitting diode trail showing off a bendable OLED video screen that would make it possible to literally wear what you want to display. Actor Tom Hanks demonstrated a pair of prototype Sony eyeglasses with built-in video screens for watching full-length movies.

Sony Ericsson offered up a clamshell-design music mobile phone for style-conscious consumers and a candy-bar shaped phone boasting Sony’s “Smile Shutter” technology, which is supposed to make taking pictures of people grinning easier.

Motorola lived up to the “green” theme of this year’s CES introducing its W233 “Renew” mobile phone, which it says is made partly from recycled water cooler bottle plastic and by purchasing carbon offsets to counter the energy needed to produce, use and dispose of the phone.

Samsung displayed a semi-transparent active matrix OLED screen and a mobile handset that does double-duty as a video projector.

And flash memory card maker SanDisk rolled out a family of fast solid-state hard drives (SSDs) designed to replace traditional hard drives in notebook PCs.

(Photos: Palm’s Pre phone, Tom Hanks wearing Sony’s movie-watching glasses, Motorola phone made of recycled water cooler bottles/ REUTERS)

Technology is supposed to make life easier for everyone, and at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we found some gadgets that are accessible by the blind and deaf.

Check out Sinead Carew’s story on how Stevie Wonder is at CES to make the case for tech that’s friendly to the blind. As she reports, with the popularity of touch screens, once simple consumer electronics such as televisions and stereos have become difficult for blind people to use as they often require navigation of multiple menus that need to be seen.

If you want to learn sign language, Krown Manufacturing will be rolling out a pocket-sized device that may help. Use a stylus to type a word on the Sign Language Translator’s touch screen and it will play a video clip of that word translated into sign language. The device has over 3,500 words in sign language, Krown says. It doesn’t do phrases yet, but may some day.

This video is kind of grainy, but hopefully you’ll get the idea:

We gave you our notes from a Q&A with Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, yesterday. Here’s a clip of him talking about Microsoft’s three screens strategy (PC, phone, TV) and what it means for the consumer.

In the old days -– say six months ago -– netbooks were easy to describe in a few short words. Cheap (less than $400), small (10-inch screen or less) and light (less than 3 pounds). Alas, things are not quite so simple anymore.

The netbook category’s parameters were already expanding as the market flooded with new offerings. Screen sizes crept up, as did retail prices.

And then along comes Sony to really confuse things with its Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC, which it unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s plenty small (8-inch screen) and light (1.4 pounds). But note that decidedly un-netbook-like price tag: $900.

Of course, the company itself is not calling it a netbook either, although plenty of others are. And the impressive array of high-performance bells and whistles Sony packed into the little laptop might well justify the hefty price tag, and succeed in separating it from its similarly small, yet more stripped-down and lower-market peers.

So call it what you want, netbook or mini notebook or something else entirely. The Vaio P is simply the latest evidence that ultra-portable computers, though they may be small, are succeeding in redefining the PC world.

After watching Bill Gates deliver Microsoft’s keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show for 12 years, CEO Steve Ballmer finally got his moment in the sun on Wednesday.

We were rooting for you Steve, but next time, tell your friends not to steal your thunder.

First, it was Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg leaking the news that the U.S. phone company has picked Microsoft as its default mobile search provider. It’s a big win for Microsoft, which has been lagging behind Google and Yahoo on the Web, but Ballmer didn’t get to be the first to tell the world. Seidenberg stole the spotlight, announcing the deal at a Citi investor conference earlier on Wednesday. We were hoping Microsoft would take back the limelight by giving us more details when it was Ballmer’s turn at CES, but alas, all the CEO said was, “I’m also thrilled to announce a new long term partnership with Verizon to offer our live services on all Verizon phones.”

Besides the Verizon deal, Ballmer also announced at CES the beta test launch of Windows 7, Halo Wars, a Windows Live deal with Dell, and a bunch of other stuff. But most of it, while good news, didn’t seem to wow the crowds at the Palazzo Ballroom in the Venetian hotel.

The funniest moment of the keynote, in our opinion, was when Ballmer joked about the advice Bill Gates gave him for his first-ever keynote. Ballmer flashed a message on the screen from Gates that said “There are always two conventions going on during CES - make sure you go to the right one.” The other conference is the adult entertainment expo, of course (if you didn’t know).

He then followed with supposed messages from President-elect Barack Obama, disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich and others, including this faux gem from Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang:

“Why do you keep ignoring my Facebook requests?”

(Photos: Reuters)

Robbie Bach, President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, sat down to talk to Reuters at CES in Las Vegas, ahead of the big keynote address by CEO Steve Ballmer. Topics discussed ranged from the Windows 7 beta and eventual launch, Microsoft’s mobile search deal with Verizon, and how the tough economic environment is affecting the company.

What is the status of Windows 7? Is it still on track for its launch debut?
It’s absolutely on track for the debut that we won’t tell you the date of. Three years from the last one. (Vista shipped in the fall of 2006 to businesses, and early 2007 to consumers). The date has some range in it for that reason. It’s a very good product.

What have you learned from the ups and downs of the Vista launch?
We learned that people’s early experience with the product when it ships is important. Initially when it shipped, we didn’t have as much compatibility as we would like. And that frustrated some people early on. That’s all gone now. But certainly with Windows 7 we want to get that right from the start.

How has the economy’s problems affected Microsoft plans?
The economy is going through a reset. There is no question about that. In the short term that means that every business is having some impact. Our general approach is to say that this is a reset, we are going to manage through that and come out the other end of that reset a much stronger company with a great product lineup. And you are going to see us continue to invest in technologies. But (we have) tremendous optimism about where the market is going and what the opportunities are over the next 5 years.

There are rumors out there about job cuts at Microsoft. What can you say about that?
We are not gong to comment about rumors. We will see how that plays out. You will see how that plays out in the market.

Netbooks are big at CES this year. Are netbooks (many run on Linux) hurting your Windows business at all?

In the economy, people are going to be more value driven, and we understand that. But over time you are going to see us invest in Windows both from a netbook all the way up to highest-end server that you can imagine. That’s sort of how our business model works. You are going to see us continue to do it. That will create some fluctuations, plus or minus, in different parts of the business. But it’s important to have the full range of products. Netbooks in the marketplace today, about 85 percent of them are running Windows.

Tell about your mobile advertising and search deal with Verizon.

This is a deal where we will be providing search and advertising services for all of their search capable mobile phones, not just Windows mobile phones, across their spectrum of phones. Search and mobile is in a very early stage and we think it has a huge potential, but we also don’t think it is going to be like search on the desktop. This is an opportunity for both Verizon and Microsoft to really build a great search experience in he mobile space.

Does this displace Google in any way?
Today they do their advertising with a variety of people. I certainly think that Google would have been the competition for that business. I think that’s a safe assumption. It gives us a pole position in mobile search.

Does the Verizon deal mean you are gunning for Google?
It’s not a big secret that Google and Microsoft are going to compete in the market place in a lot of different places.

But this is a big win, right?
Yes, it’s an important win. The reality is that because we are so early in the mobile area of search, to me, the success of this deal is not about us versus Google. That’s not why it is important to us. The reason it is important to us is to work with somebody like Verizon to really build out what the search experience on a phone is like and that fundamental work can lay the foundation for a whole new business for us and for Verizon. Neither one of us has a big business there today, in fact nobody has a big business on mobile search today.

(Photo: Robbie Bach at CES 2008)

If gadgets were fashion models, Samsung would probably send its TVs, Blu-ray players and camcorders sashaying down the runway, with reporters and photographers scrambling to get close. That’s how proud they were of their gadgets at the Consumer Electronics Show — admittedly, they were all slim, sexy and worth a slip of drool.

The South Korean electronics giant paraded a number of new or upgraded TV models in Las Vegas today, including a line-up of high-definition TVs that are supposed to be more energy efficient because they use LED as a light source rather than traditional cathode lamps.

Jongwoo Park, Samsung’s president of digital media, was quite bullish when asked about the tiny LED TV market. “We’re going to create the market,” he said.

Since these TVs use less energy and contain no mercury, Samsung’s hoping the growing body of green consumers will be tempted to buy thems. No price points yet, though.

Samsung also showed off a new Blu-ray player, billed the world’s slimmest at only 1.5 inches thick. In fact, Samsung executive Tim Baxter said these gadgets are meant to be “show offs.”

But who’s buying these days? “Even in these tough times, people will invest in their family,” Baxter said. And if you’re not buying, you could always get close.

Toshiba’s pricey Regza LCD televisions are getting cosmetic surgery this year, the Japanese electronics maker announced at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday.

Not that these TVs need a face lift, but companies do like to make splashy announcements in Las Vegas.

The newest Regza TVs will have “cutting-edge cosmetics” due to its “Deep Lagoon” design, which is “inspired by the beauty and elegance of nature” and provides a 3D feeling, according to Toshiba.

Except that when Toshiba Vice President of Marketing for Television Products Scott Ramirez tried to invoke the Deep Lagoon feeling by asking reporters at the press conference to close their eyes and imagine they were in a cool, blue paradise, he was met with a hundred blank stares.

(Tip: reporters like news).