The Non-Geek Guide to the Consumer Electronics Show

LAS VEGAS -- The trek across the plain of taupe carpet was so treacherous and full of distractions that it could be the premise of a video game. From every direction I was accosted by the noise of blaring flat-screens and approached by eager Samsung representatives dying to introduce me to their Hulu-enabled this-or-that.

It took real courage to ask one of these fellows to point the way to what I was really after. In fact, he didn't even know they had any. And his question was, perhaps, similar to yours: "You're looking for the, uh, refrigerators?"

Oh, but not any old fridge. When I finally found them in a quiet nook of Samsung's gargantuan spread on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show on Thursday, I understood why tech writer Deb Shadovitz suggested I have a look.

This $3,399 beauty, given the unsexy name of RSG309 and due to market this spring, has an 8-inch LCD Wi-Fi-enabled screen that lets you look up a recipe on Epicurious, catch the news, cycle through photos of your family and keep your brood's activity calendar. Heck, it's even got speakers so you can play music via Pandora.

To me, that's cool. No, I'd never spring that kind of money for a refrigerator, but this tells you just the kind of geek I am. There are 150,000-plus attendees in Vegas this week for the CES, the world's biggest tech trade show. The vast majority of them will ooh and ahh at such completely unnecessary and faddish items as 3-D televisions, but I'm drawn to the things in this frighteningly massive nerdfest that might actually have practical impacts on people's lives.

For instance, there were several useful gizmos for people like me who constantly lose stuff. Such as:

• The Mavia. This $200 gadget, which comes out this summer, plugs into your car's diagnostic port -- all models post-1996 have one, but few people know it -- and can tell you via the Web where you left your car if you forget where you parked. It also lets you keep track of your teenager when she takes your car, sending off alarms for you if she goes somewhere she's not supposed to. Also, it can tell you why that check-engine light is on and whether you actually need to take it in.
• The Cobra PhoneTag. The key chain with a GPS locator in it will cost $60 when it comes out this summer. You can attach it to your keys or your computer bag, and when you lose it, you can get its location.
• GadgetTrak. A service that for $35 a year can pinpoint your missing laptop by Wi-Fi positioning technology. It will send you photos from the laptop's camera, too, to show you who's got it. And it will both store all your data for you to retrieve and then wipe it from the machine, a valuable service at a small price.

Another fun little item is the nPower Peg, a 9-inch cylinder that uses the kinetic energy of a person's normal movement to store some battery power. You keep it in your bag and when you need a little extra juice for your phone or iPod, you connect the device to the nPower Peg. If you're in an emergency situation, you can shake it vigorously to create more charge faster. It's a little pricey at $159, but it could be useful in certain troublesome situations.

The French company Withings had two devices I found awfully practical:

• The $129 blood pressure monitor, which is available as of this week, lets you take your blood pressure via an arm wrap and have the data transmitted to an iPhone or computer. There it graphs your data, which can be useful.
• A $129 baby monitor that transmits video to an iPhone via wireless Internet and can even alert a parent if, say, the room is getting too warm. My only fear about it, however, was that it seems like the perfect device to hide in, say, your college roommate's dorm room to broadcast his private activities. All of Withings' material shows images of blissfully sleeping babies, but it seems the device could also be used for evil.

There were plenty of items that seemed like they fit my domestic or mundane interests but didn't. The Neato XV-11, for instance, is a $400 robotic vacuum cleaner. It can only hold about a quart of dust and would be pretty worthless on stairs or hard-to-reach places. Not so neat-o.

And the guy from pipSqueak made an interesting -- if sexist -- case that women are constantly missing calls because their phones are in their bags or purses on silent or vibrate.

To combat this crucial problem, his company offers the pipSqueak, a $60 clip-on device that, via Bluetooth, alerts a person -- evidently female although he did mention that men who leave their phones off when they play sports might also benefit -- that they've got an incoming call and who it's from. She can put it into voicemail or hit a button and a message will tell the caller that she's hunting for her phone and she'll get to you momentarily. In other words, she can put you on hold for however long she needs to without even talking to you.

But the clunker of the show belonged to Thermador, a company trying to tell $3,000 ovens. As much as I cook, I might consider spending that amount if the oven let me, say, look in on my food from another room and remotely change the temperature.

No such luck. This thing just cooks stuff faster using some sort of steam-convection process. As the Thermador representative told me all the thrilling benefits of that, I stared, puzzled, at the oven chamber. He claimed it could hold a 14-pound turkey, and I suppose that's possible, but there were issues I had that went beyond Thanksgiving.

"Is this supposed to be someone's main oven?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied.

"Does it come in a larger model?"

"No."

"Then," I said, "how would you get a normal-sized cookie sheet in there?"

He stared at me blankly and then answered: "Gee, I don't know."

Oops.