At every CES, there’s one company–usually in a small booth off the beaten track–with the single best name at the show.

In 2011, that company was Dream Cheeky.

Not to get all gushy or anything, but I think one of Harry’s best opinion columns here was the one from March 2009 about how smartphones are destined to replace the PC, and how the comforts of full-sized computing — keyboard, mouse, monitor — will become dumb shells for our powerful handsets.

Motorola’s Atrix 4G is an indication that he’s right. The phone itself marks a technological leap, as one of several new Android handsets with dual-core processors, but the real revolution is an optional dock that acts like a laptop when the phone is plugged in. There’s also a separate HD dock for televisions and external monitors, with USB ports for full-sized keyboards and mouses. Ladies and gentlemen: your dumb shells.

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On a quiet island within Sharp’s CES booth, a handful of glasses-free 3D smartphones were on display. They had eye-catching layered menus, 3D conversion of standard photos and a cute demo of swimming fish. (Rule of thumb: every 3D demo involves sea animals at some point.)

It only took a few minutes of playing around to see how undesirable all this 3D could be.

On tbe most obvious level, staring at a glasses-free 3D screen for a prolonged period can have a dizzying effect, but not all 3D is created equal, and maybe Sharp’s implementation is sub-par. My real concern is that smartphones aren’t conducive to 3D content in the first place.

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As we are ready to close the book on yet another CES, and its  exhibitors and attendees pack their bags to make the trip home, it begs the question: Is CES even useful anymore? Is it a product of a bygone era in tech, now rendered nearly useless in this age of the 24-hour news cycle?

It’s a good question, and one that definitely is worthy of debate among the tech community at large.

In the interest of full disclosure, my first (and last) CES was in 2005, as part of the Betanews staff. I have to admit as a tech geek I was certainly excited. But upon getting there, I found myself more disappointed than anything: Looking for good stuff there seemed like something akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.

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Until seeing the Xperia Arc up close, I’ d never been excited about a Sony Ericsson phone. (I’d describe my mood about the rumored Playstation Phone as cautiously optimistic.)

To my surprise, the Xperia Arc was impressive in both hardware and software. It’s as if Sony took the missteps of the Xperia X10 — outdated Android, unremarkable specs — and learned.

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For some reason, I have a silly infatuation with projector phones, even though no phone makers have attempted to put one into a modern smartphone handset.

At a pre-CES event Wednesday, pico projector maker Microvision was hoping to plant the idea in manufacturers’ heads. They’ve cobbled together a prototype Android “tablet” — a phone, really, minus the phone guts — with a laser projector. The device is unlikely to be released as it appeared at the show, but it served its purpose of throwing videos and photos onto a wall in a well-lit room.

The projector phone is a bit chunky, measuring 0.67 inches thick, and when I picked it up, it was warm to the touch. When the projector is running, the device lasts for about two hours.

Bulk and power consumption aside, Microvision’s biggest hurdle is price. The company won’t say how much it expects to charge manufacturers for its embedded projectors, but Microvision’s standalone ShowWX projector costs $400 at retail. My guess is that we’re still a couple years away from seeing laser projection as a feature in any widely-available smartphones. I wonder if Android will still be the reference device du jour then.

Samsung's TX100 Slider PC

With so many mobile PCs hitting the market, hardware makers are doing all they can to differentiate their products, a trend particularly evident right now among tablets vying to unseat Apple’s iPad. Samsung is differentiating to the hilt with two Windows 7 mobile PCs unveiled on the eve of CES: a new “slider” tablet PC, and a slimline ultraportable notebook.

Samsung previewed both the TX100 — also referred to as the Slider PC 7–and the Notebook PC 9 at a news conference during CES Press Day on Wednesday in Las Vegas, amid a flurry of Samsung TV announcements.

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Wednesday is Press Day here at CES, a day when major consumer electronics players like LG, Netgear and Intel traditionally make big announcements in advance of the full show that starts tomorrow. If there’s an underlying message here in Las Vegas so far, it’s that companies are getting the word that consumers want to view more content–whether Hollywood- or user-generated–from and over the Internet, on devices ranging from TVs to PCs and smartphones.

In delivering a roadmap of LG’s TV plans for 2011 today, Tim Alessi, LG’s director of new product development for home electronics, listed “more content to watch”  – together with connectivity to home networks and easier-to-use 3D TV – as the three key linchpins for the year ahead.

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Of all the CES 2010 tablets that turned to vapor, Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 Hybrid was my favorite. So I was delighted to see the dual-processor, dual-OS tablet-laptop back at CES 2011 on Tuesday, in the same pre-show event at which it debuted last year.

Lenovo likes to say that the U1 has “two brains.” Underneath the keyboard, there’s an Intel ultra-low voltage processor powering Windows 7. The screen is actually a removable 10-inch tablet (known as the “LePad” on its own) with an ARM-based Snapdragon processor that switches to a customized version of Android when removed from the base. While the tablet is removed, you can still use Windows by plugging the base into an external monitor.

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Microsoft has released a teaser video for Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote tomorrow that it presumably hopes will go viral–and hey, I just helped it do so!

Speaking of teasing, here’s a little shameless self-promotion for our coverage tomorrow…

My TIME.com Technologizer column for this week is a CES preview of sorts: I explain why it’s dangerous to accept the show’s big news at face value until products have reached stores and consumers have had the chance to give them a yay or nay. And then I list a few products and categories which I’ll be on the lookout for.

I head to the show on Tuesday afternoon–the show floor doesn’t open until Thursday, but stay tuned for news as I encounter it throughout the week…

For tech journalists, there’s no such thing as a new year’s holiday. We’re all too busy getting ready for next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The show floor doesn’t open until Thursday, but the festivities get rolling on Tuesday–and on Wednesday evening, Steve Ballmer will give Microsoft’s traditional keynote address. At last year’s event, he announced iPad-esque “Slate PCs” that went pretty much nowhere; this year, he’s expected to talk about another iteration of the concept and maybe even provide an early look at Windows 8.

I’ll be covering the show all week, and will liveblog the Ballmer keynote as it happens. You can join me at www.technologizer.com/ces2011–and if you head there right now, you can even sign up to get a reminder by e-mail.

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?

For ten years we’ve been firm in the belief that the consumer always knows best.  Trends come and go, but good products stand the test of time. And since consumers vote with their pocketbooks, they know what it takes to make  a product succeed.

In 2011, for the tenth time we’ll gather at International CES in Las Vegas to present ten finalists who have the right stuff.

How do we get from here to there? It’s all happening at LastGadgetStanding.com. We’re inviting the best of the best tech experts to join us for this gala year.  Harry McCracken of Technologizer will be cohosting the events.  His insights and good taste will set a new bar.

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The Consumer Electronics Show is not a prime venue for video games, although it used to be, back before gaming had its own trade show, E3. But while some of my game journalism friends flew in and immediately started grumbling about how little there was to do, I enjoyed the scraps of stick time snuck in between checking out all the new tech toys. And unlike E3′s usual far-off fare, most of the games I played at CES are coming out in the next month or two. Here are the higlights of what I saw:

Heavy Rain: I played one scene of this PS3-exclusive adventure game at a party for bloggers, and despite the festive atmosphere, my heart was racing and palms were sweating as I tried to subdue an armed convenience store robber using smart dialog choices. No shooting galleries here, just pure dramatic tension. I can’t wait for February 23.

Splinter Cell: Conviction: I miss the game’s pure stealth roots, and being able to rely so easily on gunplay instead felt cheap, but if you do perform stealth kills, you earn the ability to execute, well, even easier silent kills. It’s out February 23 for PC and Xbox 360.

Lego Universe: It’s a third-person beat-em-up, due sometime this year, in the style of previous Lego Batman, Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, plus the ability to cooperate with people online. That’s worth a yawn, but I’m excited for the inclusion of Lego’s existing Digital Designer software. I’m told that you can build things in Digital Designer and put them in your home space within the game. Wait, a Lego game that actually encourages creativity? Cool.

Super Stardust HD in 3D: Sony’s 3D gaming kiosks didn’t make me want to buy a capable television right now, but I did enjoy seeing this pop out of the screen. The game’s out now in two dimensions.

Capcom Goes Retro: At an off-site suite, Capcom had a few old-school offerings on display. Final Fight Double Impact, due for Xbox 360 and PS3 in April, is the same beat-em-up as ever, plus achievements, a virtual bezel that looks just like the old arcade machine and a lesser-known 1990s arcade title, Magic Sword, packed in. But the real attraction was Mega Man 10, out in March. Yeah, it’s the same jump-and-gun platformer I’ve been playing since childhood, but I always come crawling back.

Laying unceremoniously towards the end of Nvidia’s booth at a press event tonight was an early prototype of the Ultra, an Android 2.0 tablet developed by ICD.

It’s the same tablet (or slate — I’m as baffled as Harry by the terminology shift) that appeared briefly, of all places, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a 7-inch tablet with all the trimmings: Wi-Fi, 3G, Webcam, MicroSD slot, 4 GB of internal memory and, of course, Nvidia’s formidable Tegra chip. An Nvidia representative promised more and better tablets at the company’s booth tomorrow, but I had to take a stab at this one tonight.

The Ultra was a bit buggy, which explains why Nvidia wasn’t making a big deal of it. As soon as I picked it up, it crashed. Then it took a while to load up. Then the touch screen acted a bit dodgy. And yet, I walked away excited.

What most impressed me was the tablet’s speed and smoothness. Maybe it’s the iPhone effect, but lately I’ve become obsessed by this sort of thing. And because I’ve never seen Android running so smoothly — even the Nexus One phone on display elsewhere at the event showed some choppiness — using the Ultra was a pleasure. A 1080p version of Star Trek played without a stutter, and the e-reader function flipped nimbly between pages.

We don’t yet know what Apple has in store — or for that matter, whether Apple has anything in store at all — but even if it’s something completely surprising, I could get comfortable with Tegra and Android as purveyors of working class tabletslates. We’ll see what else is in store tomorrow.