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.”

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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)