Home Server Technologies Inc. (HSTi) showcased an innovative new technology called Wireless Media Stick, a simple and affordable product that allows media connectivity between mobile devices, TVs, DVD players and more.

The product addresses this year’s underlying theme of connectivity, but unlike Google TV or Samsung’s Smart Hub products, all of which can run a hefty cost after subscriptions and hardware, the Wireless Media Stick is available for a modest $119.

The unit looks like any USB flash drive. After connecting to a main computer that contains media files, the computer is enabled (all the software is embedded into the product), and the Media Stick can be inserted into any device with a USB playback port — and through a wireless connection users have the ability to access and share photos, videos and music.

What’s especially interesting about the technology is that you can also stream on-the-go; the Wireless Media Stick app is downloadable for smartphones and by taking the Stick to any location you can directly stream data from a mobile device to any TV, computer or stereo that is USB playback compatible.

The reasonably-priced Wireless Media Stick is currently available and should be particularly appealing to high school and college students who are constantly on-the-go and accustomed to easily sharing their media content.

Appotronics specializes in low power and highly portable projectors. They offer a wide range of projectors with connections to practically any source (VGA, HDMI, composite) as well as embedded SD card slot for direct media playback on select models.

The LP200 is an LED driven DLP ‘pocket projector’ (pictured left) with a very respectable 200 lumen output, 858×600 resolution, 2000:1 contrast ratio, a 30,000 hour bulb life, a built-in speaker and an SD card slot for an all-in-one media playback solution.

However, their newest projector (the Y|X) more than doubles the light output at 500 lumens and still only uses as much power as a typical lightbulb (60W).

Optoma’s latest pocket projector, the PK201 (pictured right), can literally fit in your pocket — it’s the size of an iPhone. It also uses an LED lit DLP and has a built in SD card slot for direct media playback. However, this model only puts out 20 lumens so it’s very limited in its application.

Microvision, one of the pioneers in the pico projector market, has also doubled the light output of their previous model meaning it can paint a surprisingly bright picture given its size. The ShowWX+ uses laser light to drive a micromirror (not DLP) at 858×480 resolution in a 16:9 aspect ratio. The good news — it uses lasers (!!!) which means you never have to focus. The bad news — it’s still only 15W, which means you won’t be running your home theater (or your closet theater) from it.

Oh, and laser light projectors still have ‘speckle’ — an artifact caused by light of the same wavelength destructively interfering which cause dark and light spots to crawl all over the projected image. Still, as seen on the left, the image is certainly relatively bright and punchy. The projector is even being powered by the iPhone that’s providing the video.

It’s a great sign that these low power microprojectors are doubling their light output but still maintaining very low power requirements from one year to the next.

In years past it was really hard to imagine being able to use a projector with a sub-100 lumen light output, but at 500 lumens we are really starting to see something you could use for small gatherings.

Samsung announced a tablet that runs on Windows instead of Android, and it’s drawing a lot of attention at CES. The Sliding PC 7 is a touch-screen device with its own slide-out keyboard, giving users the option of a multi-touch display or full keyboard and mouse.

Larger than an iPad but smaller than many Netbooks, the 10.1-inch Sliding PC 7 features a multitouch screen so it can operate in both tablet- and Netbook-like formats. This could be the Netbook/tablet hybrid that many have been hoping for…

“With the proliferation of tablet devices, there is a demand from consumers that want the elegance, ease-of-use and portable form factor of a tablet but also the familiarity of a notebook,” said Scott Ledterman, director of mobile PC product marketing at Samsung. “The Samsung 7 Series is creating a category unto itself, with a total solution that is not only chic and convenient for content consumption, but also versatile enough for more intensive computing and content creation.”

The tablet has front- and back-facing cameras, a MicroSD slot and 3G card insert. In order to maintain its trim dimensions, the full-sized USB port has been replaced with a mini-HDMI port (although a mini-HDMI-to-USB 2.0 adapter is available). Other specs include: an Intel Atom Z670 CPU, 2GB RAM, 32 or 64GB SSD drive, along with 3G and WiMax connectivity.

The unit being demonstrated on the show floor is still pre-production, although Samsung suggests the Sliding PC 7 Series will be available starting at $699 in May.

One of the most interesting (and nerdy) things you can find at this year’s show is from a small vendor called Vidtonic. Vidtonic is hopping on the Android bandwagon, but they are approaching it from a very different angle than everyone else.  While Motorola and others go to great pains to protect their hardware from hackers who want to modify the default OS or overclock their processors, Vidtonic aims to sell open source hardware units to this community, allowing them complete freedom to tinker in whatever way they wish.

Although specific kits and pricing aren’t yet nailed down, the general idea is that you’ll be able to buy a motherboard with CPU, memory and onboard audio/video. Inputs and outputs can be customized via add-on cards. Then you’ll be able to download the already freely distributed Google Android OS platform with the Linux drivers necessary for the Vidtonic board directly from them. From that point on, what you do with it is only limited by your time and creativity.

Vidtonic will even provide a higher end SKU which comes with a display and and the electronics mentioned above.

It’s Lego Mindstorm for AV hackers. The ultimate promise here is obvious. Ground zero of the media center STB scene started with a community of Xbox hackers in the early 2000′s who built Xbox Media Center (XBMC) to provide a platform for an all-in-one media box for the living room. While Sony and Logitech are putting tons of investment into Google TV, it’s this ‘crowdsourcing’ approach to feature development that has historically provided the best solutions and the most innovation.

When the SageTV, MythTV and current Android hacking communities get their hands on these units we’ll see a wave of incredibly innovative applications for media hubs.

While robots that clean your floors (Roomba) have been around for years, Ecovacs has introduced two very interesting robot helpers for the home. The Winbot is a robot that attaches to your windows and scrubs them clean. The unit consists of two halves of a clamshell (for lack of a better word) that are magnetically coupled around your window pane. One half provides locomotion to both sides and the other does the washing, meaning you have to flip it to clean both. The newer model can even cling onto double pane windows with a 1-inch gap.

Another model introduced this year has a sensor to detect poor air quality (odors as well as particles such as smoke) and will actually move to parts of your home with the highest concentration of poor air quality to clean it. Airbot (bet you didn’t see that coming) is equipped with 2 HEPA filters and an activated charcoal filter.

If there’s anything Hollywood movies have taught me, it’s that robots always start out as cute and cuddly window washers but eventually try to destroy humanity. If  T-1000, I mean “Airbot”, gets an Ethernet jack next year so he can call Skynet, I’m heading for the hills.

At CES Sensio announced the launch of a 3D Internet content library for streaming 3D movies to Internet enabled 3DTVs or STBs. The content library currently consists of about 50 films and is available to existing VOD providers.

Sensio has also announced increased efforts at enabling 3D console gaming by providing a software kit to developers that will encode the 3D game output into a number of 3D formats. This is particularly useful for the Xbox 360, which doesn’t natively support any 3D formats for gaming.

Finally, Sensio Autodetect is a licensable technology for TV manufacturers that can detect practically any 3D format and display it on TV with less than one frame of latency, meaning consumers won’t even know they’ve changed 3D formats. (See related story on Autodetect.)

Research in Motion (RIM) hasn’t kept the BlackBerry PlayBook much of a secret, but there was one specification it saved to announce at CES — the PlayBook will be a 4G device.

Wireless carrier Sprint Nextel will offer a version of the BlackBerry PlayBook that runs on Sprint’s next-generation network. The 4G PlayBook is expected to be available this summer. A release date for the Wi-Fi-only version has yet to be announced, but RIM indicated it would be available early this year.

Unlike most of the iPad competitors, PlayBook does not use Android, but will run on the BlackBerry Tablet OS that uses QNX technology. The tablet has a touch screen smaller than that on the iPad, and is geared toward business users.

Other specs include:

– Multi-touch capacitive screen (7-inch, 1024 x 600).
– Measures 5.1 x 7.6 x 0.4-inches and weighs 0.9 pounds.
– Features a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.
– Front-facing camera shoots 3MP.
– High-definition rear-facing camera takes 5MP shots.
– Adobe Flash 10.1 enabled, built-in HTML 5 support.

Video reports and commentary are available on the BlackBerry blog.

One of the emerging markets for HomePlug technology (broadband networking over existing powerline infrastructure) is energy monitoring and management. There are quite a few companies in the HomePlug Alliance pavilion demoing these kind of products, but Jetlun Corporation has one of the slickest solutions being shown.

Jetlun’s solution allows consumers or businesses to place modules between your appliances and the electrical outlet so that they can be managed, completely over your existing electrical infrastructure, by their home base station.

What really makes this solution interesting is that it is highly configurable, supporting highly customizable profiles for managing your appliances. If you don’t want a microwave or inkjet printer to draw power when not in use, set up a profile to only turn it on from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm. You can even turn a device on or off remotely – all from a web page.

I’d really like to see this kind of technology built into appliances themselves and maybe next year we will.

Aztech, a member of the HomePlug Powerline Alliance which standardizes powerline networking products, is showing off the smallest and most energy efficient products yet seen in this market.

Their new HL106E is the smallest HomePlug adapter in its class, offering 85Mbps bandwidth over your powerlines to any device connected to its Ethernet port. This unit only uses 12W of power meaning your desk lamp is drawing more power than the adapter even if it is equipped with a compact fluorescent bulb. And who needs light when you have an 85Mbps pipe anyway?

Also on display is the world’s smallest 200Mbps adapter (take that 85Mbps!) intended for high bandwidth AV  streaming.

But my favorite product by far was the HL110EW Wireless N extender. This HomePlug adapter will allow you to set up a 200Mbps Wireless-N hotspot anywhere you have an AC outlet, carrying the data across your electrical infrastructure to your HomePlug enabled router and out to the Internet. A perfect solution for Chateau Nero which, I assure you, is so palatial that one Wi-Fi access point would never cut it.

While HomePlug solutions have struggled to catch on, they are clearly become robust, fast and flexible enough to solve a lot of consumers’ home networking challenges.

In an example of the type of “electronic ecosystems” that are brewing here at CES, Chicago-based Cobra Electronics on Tuesday showcased the iRadar, which becomes GPS-enabled by downloading an app that syncs the device to an iPhone or iPod Touch.

In the spring, the app will be upgraded to include a real-time data gathering component. “The iRadar detectors will be able to share information, kind of like Tweeting,” Cobra senior vp marketing Sally Washlow said. “So if I’m driving around and I pick up a radar signal it will upload it to a cloud, and will send it out to other iRadar users.”

The device detects the location of conventional radar as well as red light- and speed cameras. An Android version is scheduled to debut in March.

“The neat thing is, the iRadar detector is $129, whereas most radar detectors with GPS built in cost $400 and up,” Washlow noted.