Dean’s top 10 picks for the best of CES

It’s never easy to pick the top 10 new products and technologies at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This year, there were more than 20,000 products from 2,700 vendors across 1.8 million square feet of space. I saw every one of them. That’s right. And these are my picks for the best of the show, in order of preference.

1. The Palm Pre smartphone has revived interest in the aging Palm platform. This phone, designed by a team formed by ex-Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, could help the company steal some mojo from Apple’s iPhone. As we wrote in an earlier story, it has some things that the iPhone doesn’t: a wireless charging dock, a removeable battery, and a full, slide-down QWERTY keyboard. It uses gesture controls such as sideways or vertical flicking with your finger on its touch screen. It has the ability to run multiple applications at the same time, and it has a very smart way to integrate your various address books. It can, for instance, take the Facebook photos of your friends and integrate them with the phone numbers in your Outlook contact list. Then the Pre automatically creates an integrated contact list that shows both the photos and phone numbers for each friend. You can zoom in or out on web pages using finger gestures and easily find phone numbers and information through a predictive search function.

2. Yahoo Widget Engine. This platform for putting simple web applications — dubbed widgets — on the TV could become the Trojan Horse into the TV set. Four major TV makers — Sony, Samsung, LG, and Vizio — showed off connected TVs that could access videos on the Internet on new models available as early as the spring. The Yahoo Widget Engine has a development kit, jointly developed with Intel, which allows just about anyone to develop widgets for the TVs. A lot of the TVs already have YouTube access. But now you can use the widget engine to get access to sites such as your own MySpace account, Yahoo News, Yahoo Weather, Flickr, eBay, CBS, The New York Times, Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, Showtime, Twitter and USA Today. These sites scroll across the bottom of the TV screen and you can click to access them with the remote control. You can continue to watch TV while you read messages or updates from your friends.

3. Kodu was highlighted by Microsoft executive Robbie Bach during Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer’s keynote. This visual programming language for the Xbox 360 will let children design and play their own 3-D games using an Xbox 360 controller. Microsoft already has its XNA Game Studio Express tools for professional game designers, and so far 111 user-created games have been posted on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Community Games Channel. But Kodu targets children with a simple set of tools and an easy menu-based user interface. Users need no prior programming knowledge. Kodu lets kids set up situations such as “if, then” scenarios, like if the robot sees an apple, eat the apple and then make the apple disappear. You can also easily morph the terrain in a 3-D space to suit your needs. It has a library of objects you can place within the environment. This started with research at the University of California at Santa Barbara and has become a full-fledged product coming soon. Kids can test their games right away, so the act of creation becomes more like a game itself. People will be able to buy it with Xbox Live points, somewhere up to $10 worth apparently, but the exact price has not been set yet. It will be