It seems like Yahoo chief Jerry Yang fell into the usual trap of keynoters at CES of trying to sound relevant by demonstrating products in January, but then admitting they will be delivered who knows when?

And for a company that seems forever trapped in the process of trying to make something synergistic from its disparate parts and acquisitions (think Flickr, Upcoming and Del.icio.us), that can’t be good.

Mr Yang said it was time to get Yahoo yodelling again, but the only substance in his speech was the announcement of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for mobile devices and a demo of what Yahoo Mail could look like in the future.

Yahoo Go did look a big improvement on the 2.0 version and the carousel of services it offers, always limited by the size of the mobile screen.

It includes a redesign, a new mobile home page and mobile widgets that third parties are expected to provide now Yahoo is opening up its platform. But the service is only in its early beta phase and is limited to just a few devices.

The Yahoo Mail revamp looked impressive with its ability to rank the importance of address-book contacts and reveal their activities in a style similar to Facebook’s newsfeed and Plaxo’s Pulse.

Jerry Yang showed how an email or instant messaging discussion about where to eat for dinner could be dragged onto a Yahoo Maps icon to reveal favoured locations or turned into an Evite invitation.

However, as Mr Yang and fellow co-founder David Filo confessed, this was still very much in the concept phase.

“We are not that far away, some of the building blocks are there today,” said Mr Filo, in a statement that summed up Yahoo’s continuing quest for its holy grail of joined-up social networking and Web 2.0 services.

Portable navigation devices should be a godsend for finding your way around the vast Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and there are plenty of new ones to choose from on display in the booths.

Garmin has refreshed its lineup and announced a $100 plug-in that GPS-enables a laptop, with its familiar mapping software and directions included.

Magellan said its next generation of devices will have a wireless connection that allows them to connect to Google Local Search to find businesses in their area and get directions to them.

Sony has re-entered the category in North America with two new devices, the nav-u NV-U73T and NV-U83T. They are much-improved successors to Sony’s first effort, the NV-U70 unveiled at CES two years ago. The company says it planned an update to the U70 before deciding to "go back to the drawing board" for these models.

I was given a pre-show demo and was impressed with a non-electronics feature – a suction-cup base that provides a rock-solid connection to the dashboard but, with the release of a lever,  can be easily moved and remounted.

The high-end 83T has a 4.8-inch touch-screen display, which offers a dual-view as the driver approaches turns and gesture commands - drawing a roof with a finger, makes the destination become home. A POSITION Plus feature uses a pressure sensor, gyro sensor and an acceleration sensor to judge altitudes and give better indications of position when a view of the GPS satellite is blocked.

The 83T also includes a built-in microphone and Bluetooth to add hands-free phone calls with Bluetooth-equipped cell phones. The 73T should sell for around $350 from February and the 83T for $500.

This batch of announcements could cause a rethink by Silicon Valley start-up Dash Navigation, which made its internet-enabled Dash Express available for pre-order last month at a rather costly $600 and with monthly charges of $10-$13.

With high-definition images now available from the smallest cameras and even mobile phones, the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is being adapted to provide a link with HDTVs.

Silicon Image, the Silicon Valley company whose technology is behind HDMI, has come up with a proprietary solution for smaller devices that should eventually be adopted in some form by the standard.

Its Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) reduces the pin-count of an HDMI connector from 19 to five to suit a smaller device and interface.

It plans to introduce this as a "dongle" converter or a docking station that will have a standard HDMI connection on the other end.

"This opens up a huge new set of segments," says Stevan Eidson, director of product marketing at Silicon Image.

While only the smartest smart phones will be able to take advantage of the new connection, the research company In-Stat estimates the inclusion of phones, point-and-shoot cameras and portable media players will grow the addressable market from less than 250m devices last year to 1bn in 2010.

The move by Silicon Image also gives it more breathing room ahead of the WirelessHD standard being developed by a Silicon Valley rival SiBeam and a consortium of consumer electronics manufacturers.

HDMI has helped to reduce the clutter of connecting cables around the television and WirelessHD may remove them entirely now it is finally getting off the ground.

Its "special interest group" consortium - led by LG, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba - has just announced Version 1.0 of its wireless specification for high-definition baseband video transmission.

The specification arrives nine months later than expected, but WirelessHD’s backers have had to convince the Motion Picture Association of America that the technology offers content protection and can be restricted enough so as not to beam movies across an apartment complex.

Intel has joined the group, which now includes 40 "early adopter and promoter companies".

“With the completion of the WirelessHD specification, consumer electronics manufacturers can focus on their WirelessHD-based product development efforts,” said John Marshall, chairman of the group.

Mr Marshall is also co-founder of  SiBeam, the Silicon Valley company whose technology is at the centre of WirelessHD.

It is taking a similar position to Silicon Image, a Valley company that has developed HDMI.

"It will be interesting to see when WirelessHD comes out, how well it works," says Stevan Eidson, product marketing director at  Silicon Image.  He questions the quality of service of wireless and says HDMI is currently 10 times cheaper than WirelessHD.

The standard will also face challenges from other wireless technologies. While no WirelessHD products are yet available, Westinghouse will show off a television at the Consumer Electronics Show next week connected by Pulse-Link’s ultra-wideband (UWB) technology.

Touch-typing took on a new meaning for me this year as I struggled to hit the right letters with my fingers on the touch-sensitive iPhone.

What was more satisfying was the multi-touch capabilities the iPhone introduced – expanding the size of a photo by the spreading of fingers, stroking through a music collection in Cover Flow mode.

Touch has been a major trend of 2007, from the iPod touch and iPhone and their imitators to Microsoft’s coffee-table Surface PC.

Balda, a German company, was a major beneficiary of the iPhone’s popularity, with its glass screen, whose software can detect several fingers at once, being adopted by Apple.

Synaptics, a Silicon Valley company, has also got in on the act – its touch technology is now in more than 25 phones.

“In devices which give you the maximum visual information and where there’s no room for keyboards, the touch screen becomes your user interface,” Francis Lee, Synaptics chief executive, told me.

Synaptics is better known for its touch pads that replace a mouse in notebook PCs. I rarely click anything on my notebook these days, using “tap zones” on the touch pads to replace a mouse left- or right-click and stroking the pad to scroll through pages or zoom in or out.

Global revenues for touch-screen technologies will nearly double from 2006 to 2012, rising from $2.4bn to $4.4bn, according to the iSuppli research firm.

It lists eight leading technologies – resistive, surface capacitive, projected capacitive, infrared, surface acoustic wave, optical, bending wave and active digitizer – and eight emerging ones - photo sensor in pixel, polymer waveguide, distributed light, strain gauge, multi-touch, dual-force touch, laser-point activated touch and 3D touch.

Resistive products are currently the cheapest and most common types of touch screen and revenues should increase at a compound annual growth rate of 3.1 per cent to 2012, says iSuppli. In contrast, multi-touch revenues, helped by the iPhone and expected adoption by handheld game consoles and map browsing systems, are expected to grow at a rate of 31 per cent.

The lights have gone out for MovieBeam, a set-top box service that failed to grab a significant slice of the movies-on-demand market.

The service closed at the weekend after its parent company Movie Gallery went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October.

MovieBeam was launched by Walt Disney in 2003, closed down in 2005 and then relaunched as a spin-off in February 2006 in which Disney, Intel, Cisco and three VC firms invested $48.5m.

Movie Gallery picked it up in March this year for just $10m.

MovieBeam’s $199 set-top box used part of the broadcast spectrum to download up to 100 new movies to its hard drive that could then be rented and watched on the user’s TV.

Its problem was too much competition appearing and too little consumer buy-in to the concept.

MovieBeam competed with video on demand offered by cable companies. Then there were other digital download services such as MovieLink and CinemaNow. These allowed downloads to PCs or laptops, which could be hooked up to a TV.

A whole range of networking devices have also been appearing such as Apple TV and D-Link’s Medialounge player with MediaMall TV channels, which allow content to be readily moved from the PC or internet to the TV screen.

A second wave of services also arrived in the past year – Amazon Unbox on Tivo, Netflix’s free online movie viewing service and Xbox Live’s impressive collection of high-definition material for the TV-connected 360 console.

Akimbo, a similar set-top box service to MovieBeam, has also failed to gain traction. In September, a Silicon Valley start-up launched the $399 Vudu box, which can stream its database of 5,000 movies to a TV over a broadband connection and charge $1 to $4 rental for each movie.

Whether any standalone set-top box service can succeed is questionable, given it has to fight for a place with games consoles and cable and satellite boxes under the TV that can have the same capability.

The television itself is moving towards becoming a device with its own direct connection to the internet, where consumers may prefer to pay for a web-based service, rather than connect up yet another piece of hardware.

Ugobe has finally hatched its baby dinosaur in time for this Christmas rather than last, but can Pleo fulfill its potential as the biggest robotic toy since its Furby forefather?

Ugobe sent me a review unit to play with for two weeks and, while I found it to be a marvel of engineering, I was not convinced the toy would have mass appeal.

The price will certainly be an obstacle to many parents buying Pleo for their children. It costs $349, $150 more than envisaged when Pleo was first unveiled almost two years ago.

The packaging and the quality of the build seem to justify the price though. Ugobe, based in Emeryville in the Bay Area, has former Apple employees on its staff and the box that Pleo comes in is well-designed as is the battery-charging accessory inside.

Pleo himself is the most advanced robotic toy to date. He initially needs to be awakened in a birthing process, aimed at helping you to bond with the toy. By gently shaking him, the dinosaur gradually unfurls, opens his eyes and gets to his feet.

Everyone in the office was wowed by the cuteness and realism of this baby camarasaurus as it walked around without the need for a remote control, exploring its environment and emitting plaintive dinosaur cries.

However, disconcertingly, the novelty of Pleo soon wore off and he was left to wander around unattended.

It was the same story at home with my nine-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. They were initially fascinated with Pleo – how he would avoid walking off the ends of tables, enjoy being tickled, hate being held by his tail and would munch on a leaf or engage in a tug of war.

But he was slow and still “didn’t do enough things”, they said, retiring to their video games after a few minutes. My daughter has grown out of Bratz dolls and my son prefers remote-controlled cars to shuffling dinosaurs, so perhaps they were not the ideal testers. But visiting friends soon got bored with Pleo as well.

The kids also thought the pet’s motors were too noisy and the speakers were not good enough quality.

They did not exploit the ability to program Pleo to do different things using an SD memory card and this feature is still being developed at Pleoworld.com.

I can imagine the Furby modding fraternity loving this aspect of the toy and creating different personalities and abilities for Pleo.

But as Ugobe’s first effort, Pleo seems like Version 1.0 of a robot that will take many more revisions before it can become the truly mobile, responsive machine that will engage children of today for more than a few minutes.

Until that is achieved, they will probably be happier racing remote-controlled cars and enjoying the alternate reality of Halo 3.

Intel’s Viiv brand, which heralded its offensive into consumer electronics two years ago, seems to be heading for early retirement.

At a Friday preview of its announcements due at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Intel said the Viiv brand would be undergoing changes in the first quarter.

Intel will no longer be doing its “works with Viiv” verification testing, which had made the brand’s sticker appear prominently on different kinds of consumer electronics devices.

It was also dropping its media server software stack associated with Viiv. “We will allow Windows Vista to deliver similar functionality,” said Jeff McCrea, vice president of the Digital Home group.

Viiv had always seemed a less than essential supplement to Window’s Media Center and Vista’s version of Media Center appears to have made it superfluous.

Part of the function of the Viiv brand was to prime the pump for a market where consumers would demand more PCs and consumer electronics devices that delivered media onto TV screens using Intel chips.

It also was associated with content partnerships with media companies, an initiative that is also being halted.

Mr McCrea said: “We didn’t see the need to continue to drive that,” referring to how the YouTube generation has grown over the past two years.

Viiv was launched at CES in January 2006. It will be know as Core 2 with Viiv in 2008 and emphasise performance.

Future plans would surround “Connect, Manage and Protect” features – allowing consumers to wake up their computers remotely and access files, enabling IT professionals to fix and administer PCs remotely and providing consumers with extra security.

Intel has never been keen to quantify the success of Viiv, leaving the impression that it has lived in the shadow of Window’s Media Center software and failed to achieve anything like the traction of Intel’s Centrino brand.

While 3D is being adopted by the movie industry as the technology that will put more bums on cinema seats, a new 3D camera being unveiled this week is designed to get people out of their chairs.

The ZCam, developed by the Israeli company 3DV Systems, represents a big advance on the motion-sensing technology currently being used to play video games by gestures rather than punching a controller.

Its array of sensors sends out infra-red pulses to bounce back off objects or a face, sending back information on their distance from the camera to an accuracy of around 5 millimetres and mapping the information to individual screen pixels.

This translates to a "heat map" kind of image where white is close, black is at a distance, while shades of grey create detailed 3D images and allow subtle movements to be picked up at 60 frames per second. Combined with a regular camera imaging chip, a user can pivot his or her face into a 3D colour profile and replace the black background with a movie of a palm-fringed beach or New York skyline, the same way TV weather presenters change their green-screen backgrounds.

3DV, which was founded 10 years ago,  sold a  few  3D cameras to broadcasters for $200,000 in its early days, to allow them to replace backgrounds. Now it expects cameras to appear for less than $100 in the second half of next year and be used as video game peripherals.

Zvika Klier, chief executive, showed me how I could fly a spitfire in a combat game and climb, dive and bank by just pushing my hands back, forward and sideways. Lifting my thumb triggered the machine gun.

Persuading publishers to write games specifically for the peripheral could prove difficult, but 3DV may benefit from a console maker adopting its technology.

Mr Klier sees video conferencing, automotive, security and robotics applications for the camera, but video gamers will benefit first from the total immersion and intuitive movements it makes possible.

3DV has more than 20 patents for its technology and backing from venture capitalists including the Valley’s Kleiner Perkins.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the US, falls this year on its earliest possible date - November 23.

The big day of store sales when retailers are supposed to go into the black for the year also signals the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season.

The latest online retail figures from the comScore research firm suggest the industry will need all those extra days of shopping – Black Friday can fall as late as the 29^th – to avoid a disappointing Christmas.

It reports retail e-commerce sales in October grew 19 per cent on last year to $9.96bn. That compares to year-to-date sales growth of 21 per cent up to the end of September.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said October’s figures often gave a glimpse of what to expect during the holiday season:

“That online sales growth rates diminished slightly in October is not entirely unexpected, as many consumers are feeling the pinch of ballooning mortgages and gas prices, coupled with a decline in housing values. Even the rapidly growing online commerce sector appears to not be immune from these economic realities,” he said.

Apparel and accessories growing by only 5 per cent in October could be down to unseasonably warm weather, he added, and a recovery in this sector could change the picture for Christmas sales online.

There were also encouraging figures for some categories of retailers. Furniture, appliances and equipment grew 105 per cent on a year ago, while sales of the Nintendo Wii, Sony’s PlayStation 3 price cuts and the success of the game Halo saw the video game sector soar 264 per cent compared to October 2006.