…and all I can really remember are the games (World in Conflict looks incredible) and the fact that MacWorld stole the show on Tuesday (by earning itself a lawsuit).

Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember the MoGo Mouse, which fits into your PCMCIA slot for recharging. I sat next to one of their sales reps on the red-eye back to Boston. It’s a neat gimmick, but nothing can ever really replace the $15 Logitech classic rat.

I also recall being completely underwhelmed by all the huge LCD monitors on display. Am I the only geek in America who’s still perfectly happy with my 30″ CRT television? Do we all really need a movie theater in our own living room? Sometimes I don’t want my media to overwhelm me.

I think Chris Kohler (who, I’m proud to say, once edited for The Primary Source) got it right when he wrote that content, not hardware, drives consumer technology. Most of the devices I saw at CES were incremental improvements on hardware that we’re already used to. The cool stuff was, by and large, software. Chris also rightfully mocks the “cartoonish lack of perspective” involved in praising every last little feature of Windows Vista as a watershed moment in computing evolution. $200 for an OS upgrade so that I can use a video for a desktop background?

Well, at least he got to see the keynote. There was no way I was making it all the way to The Venetian that early in the morning; not on my vacation. CES is kinda fun, but so is the rest of Las Vegas — and the MGM Grand Buffet is worth missing a Bill Gates speech. (For an extra $2.50, you get endless champagne, too. Rock on.)

I was briefly excited by the Windows Home Server, which is supposed to make it simple for mom and dad to set up a file server for backups. But it sounds like it’s not RAID; it’s an NTFS thing. If you just say “back this file up”, the file gets copied to one drive. If you say “back this file up redundantly”, the file gets copied onto two drives. That’s it. I suppose it’s good to let end-users decide which files deserve redundancy, and I might recommend this for my parents, but it feels a little too Fisher-Price for my own tastes. Instead of forking over money for My First Backup Server, I think I’ll stick with RAID-5 over a tower of SATA drives. (When can I buy that in a prepackaged box?)

And who can forget the iPhone? No, wait, not that one — this one!

I understand that Steve Jobs has a need for attention-grabbing publicity stunts, and hosting MacWorld at the same time as CES was pretty funny. It’s all people were talking about on Tuesday. But deliberately and publicly encouraging a lawsuit is reckless. I’m sure Jobs thinks he can get back to the negotiating table, but if someone at Cisco has a bruised ego and wants to pick a fight, it could get ugly.

Wall Street doesn’t seem to mind that the iPhone lacks Exchange integration, Office document support, and a replaceable battery. They still gave RIM and Palm a serious thumping, as if this device can somehow unseat those two from their thrones. I’m irked about that last shortcoming; smartphones die too quickly already. It’s ridiculous not to be able to replace the battery after it’s overripe. If Steve Jobs is serious about reinventing the phone, he can start by signing up for those miniature Direct Methanol Fuel Cells that we’re supposed to be getting in our gadgets soon.

Cringely has some good ideas on where the “Apple Phone” is going. I personally don’t think it will be a Blackberry killer; it’s clearly aimed at everyday consumers, not the “business professional” crowd. That it costs $600 and forces a contract with Cingular tells me that Apple wants early adopters to test out the first generation — not mom and dad, who will be busy figuring out how to use Windows Home Server. The first generation will probably suck as much as the first generation of iPod. From there, we’ll see how it goes; I hear the iPod isn’t doing too badly now.

Oh well. After the amount of money I spent just being in Vegas for a week, neither big-screen TVs nor touch-screen phones are in my near-term future.