If you weren’t at our Last Gadget Standing event at CES last month, here’s a chance to see the demo that won it all in the applause-o-meter audience voting: the company was Acer and its gadget was the Iconia two-screen laptop. The theme? Watch for yourself!

(The Acer folks shot this video record of their win.) Also seen in the clip: LGS creator Robin Raskin, celebrity cohosts Jon Hein and Gary Dell’Abate, Laptop Magazine’s Avram Piltch, and…me.

The suspense is over! Yesterday morning, a standing-room-only throng of CES attendees attended the tenth annual Last Gadget Standing event (co-sponsored by Technologizer and LGS creator Robin Raskin’s Living in Digital Times), and witnessed demos–from the straightforward to the wild and crazy–from the ten finalists. Then they voted for their favorite gizmos by clapping, cheering, whistling, hooting, and hollering.

The Last Gadget Standing–as determined by applause-o-meter at the event is Acer’s Iconia, a notebook with two 14-inch screens and a touchscreen interface. And the People’s Choice winner–determined by an online poll–is Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor “reader’s tablet.”

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A two-screened laptop. A color e-reader. A camera that does 3D. A scanner to go. A state-of-the-art Android phone. A next-generation integrated chip. A camcorder you wear. A watch with GPS. Blocks with brains of their own. And earphones that customize themselves for your particular ears.

Ten innovative products with nothing in common except one thing: They’re our Last Gadget Standing finalists. And now it’s time to figure out which one will be, indeed, the Last Gadget Standing.

If you’re in Las Vegas for CES, please come to our live event at 10:30am on Saturday, where you can see live demos of all ten products and vote for your favorite. That event will determine the Last Gadget Standing. But if you’re not in Vegas…vote anyway! This online poll that will determine the winner of our People’s Choice award.

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When we announced the Last Gadget Standing finalists last week, we said that three were still under wraps because they hadn’t been announced yet. Well, one is now public, and it’s a technology rather than a gadget per se.  It’s Intel’s new-generation Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, code-named “Sandy Bridge” and featuring a CPU, graphics, and memory controller integrated on one die for better performance and battery life. The first new i7-based PCs are now shipping, and Intel says that five hundred Sandy Bridge computers, based on 29 variants of the platform, are in the works.

Last Gadget Standing judge Joanna Stern has a good explanation of all this over at Engadget.

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Dozens of companies that will be demonstrating their products at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show nominated themselves for the Last Gadget Standing competition. We judges whittled the contenders down to 25 semi-finalists. And now we’ve cut down that list to ten finalists who will get to show their stuff at our event at CES in Las Vegas next week. One of them will be…the last gadget standing.

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Now that we’ve identified our semi-finalists for the Last Gadget Standing event at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show, we’d like your input on some of the contenders. There aren’t any direct competitors among them–many of the products, in fact, are pretty darn unique.

We do, however, have two Windows portables. There’s Acer’s Iconia, which ditches a physical keyboard in favor of a second screen that can display information or serve as a ten-finger multitouch keyboard. And there’s Asus’s U36Jc, which looks far more conventional than the Iconia but packs components–an Intel i5 CPU and discrete Nvidia graphics–which you might not expect to find in a thin-and-light laptop with a 13″ display.

Two interesting-but-very-different machines. Your take, please:

Believe me, picking products that epitomize emerging technologies at CES ain’t easy. Come to think of it, even getting a cab isn’t easy at CES. But we Last Gadget Standing judges have spent the last few weeks sorting through a fabulous selection of products. I figure our judges have each easily seen at least a couple of hundred new products this year year alone. And when they get a little jaded or overstimulated we turn to you for crowdsourced intelligence.

We’ve choose eighteen products we think you should keep your eye on. (We also have more products–including ones from Fujitsu, Intel, Nvidia, and other companies–that we can’t even talk about until January 5th, when the press day at CES begins.)

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Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Asus U36Jc-A1

Price: $999

The computing world is awash in powerful laptops. There are also more and more thin-and-light notebooks with 13″ screens. But 13″ thin-and-lights that are truly powerful? They’re still a rare breed. That’s what makes the Asus U36Jc-A1 intriguing: It looks like a typical 13-incher that emphasizes portability over potency, but it packs a standard-voltage Intel Core i5 CPU and Nvidia G310M discrete graphics. It also has Nvidia’s Optimus technology, which lets the system switch between the G310M and integrated graphics on the fly for better battery life–Asus says it can run up to nine hours on a charge.

The U36Jc-A1 has an aluminum-magnesium alloy shell, is .76″ thick, and weighs 3.4 pounds. Asus says it’ll go on sale on January 17th.

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Rullingnet Vinci

Price: $479

Parents love to toss their kids their iPads for a little fun and games, but the iPad isn’t really a toddler device.  Vinci, on the hand, was designed for toddler hands and tough use. It’s a infant-proof tablet–designed for children up to age three–with apps that include games, storybooks, and music videos.  Rather than focusing on academic teaching, they aim to show babies the world and let them be in control. And it sets out to address four key areas of early childhood development: cognitive, educational, emotional and social.

Vinci is a bit pricey at $479, but it’s built for babies with their own unique needs.

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Acer Iconia

Price: TBD

When I first saw this, I thought I was looking at the world’s biggest Nintendo DS. But Acer’s Iconia a true original.

It’s a notebook computer, based on the Intel Core i5 processor.  It has two LCD screens–one on the bottom and one on the top, offering you a ton of options for usage.

At the launch Acer said the Iconia offers the “versatility of a conventional 14” form factor with a unique dual-screen layout and highly intuitive all-point multi-touch functionality, which means you can use all the fingers of your hands.” You can browse the web or watch a video on the top screen while you’re composing a document or creating a spreadsheet on the bottom screen, for example. Or just browse the Web across two screens by laying the notebook flat.  Reading a large Web page is a total treat.

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Attention, hardware makers! We’ve extended the deadline to nominate products for Last Gadget Standing, our yearly competition to find the single coolest gizmo on display at the Consumer Electronics Show. Maybe it’s the tryptophan; maybe we’re feeling your holiday pressure. Either way, we’ve decided to give you a few more days to get your gadgets in ship shape and show the crowds your stuff.

On January 8th, at our Last Gadget Standing event at CES, we’ll have a surprise host who’s going to have you splitting your sides with laughter (and he doesn’t even need an app for that).

So if you’ve been sitting on the fence, this would be the chance to write a few words about your product and why it deserves to be Last Gadget Standing. It’s sort of our very own Black Friday! Register by December 7th (the Day of Infamy by the way). May the best gadget win.

To apply, go here.

Last Gadget Standing Nominee: Telikin

Price: $699.99

Remember turn-of-the-century Internet appliances such as 3Com’s Audrey? Telikin reminds me of them. It’s an all-in-one computer–it looks a bit like a lost generation of iMac–and has an 18.6″ touchscreen. It runs a custom environment with support for Web browsing, Skype, e-mail, calendaring, news and weather, photos, Facebook, and more. And a feature called Tech Buddy lets a technologically savvy family member or friend remote-control the Telikin in case its owner runs into trouble or needs help figuring anything out.

I suspect that if you’re reading this, Telikin is not aimed at you. But could you see it appealing to a family member who’s less of a gearhead than yourself?

Normally the electronics industry is about as mum about what they’ve been up to as Lindsay Lohan on a Saturday night, but this year seems very top secret.  We’ve already received 6 requests for non-disclosed products to be part of CES’s Last Gadget Standing.  That means that we won’t be able to tell you anything  about them until the bitter end… the day that CES opens.  What to do?  What to do?  All I can say is … stay tuned from some very different kinds of gadget beasts at the show this year.  Maybe they’ve all taken a class in Apple Mystique 101?

In a couple of months at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Technologizer will cohost the 2011 edition of Last Gadget Standing, the awards ceremony that’s been a CES highlight for ten years. The goal is to find and celebrate the single coolest gadget at the show–we define “gadget” as any device that’s small enough to carry without too much trouble–and we need your help to identify contenders.

As usual, the CES show floors will be dense with stuff, including thousands of products introduced since the last CES. So start chiming in with nominations, please: What are the coolest, most interesting most innovative gadgets of 2011? Feel free to name either the ones you think have changed the industry the most, or the ones that have simply made your life better.

As we LGS judges draw up our list of contenders, we’ll draw on your recommendations. Thanks in advance, and let the debate begin!

If you head to CES in January, make sure you pack your Emetrol along with the rest of the first-aid kit.  You’ll be walking through miles of aisles of 3D TVs, PCs, and other gizmos, and it’s not likely you’ll be wearing your 3D glasses.  Life is about to look very out of focus.

Still, like any nascent technology, 3D has its rightful place amongst competitors in our Last Gadget Standing contest. 3D TVs and monitors, profilic as they are, don’t fit in your hand, so we’re not including them in this year’s LGS.

One big topic among our LGS judges is 3D eyewear. What happens when you invite the gang over to watch the big game?  Bring your own glasses?  Compatibility issues?  One-size-fits-all issues? There’s enthusiasm for universal glasses that cross brand lines and work with all 3D systems.

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