Smells like cheap knockoff spirit.

Perhaps they lacked a crackshot marketing team, the URL they wanted was camped by someone unreasonable, or -- sadly -- they just thought it was a good idea at the time. For whatever reason, these products and companies actually made it to fruition for our sheer enjoyment.



More Best of the Worst

• CES 2008 Adwatch: Best of the worst
  
• CES 2008 booth gimmickery: Best of the worst
• CES 2008 Crapgadget
• CES 2008: Fugliest headphones awards
• The fugliest laptop you'll see all day

We've herein rounded up our picks for some of the best of the worst booth displays and decorations, and a good smattering of booth gimmicks we couldn't decide whether to file under "best" or "worst" -- we'll leave it to you to arbitrate the true winners in the comments. For our part, we don't care how fracking big Bumblebee was -- our personal favorite in this category has to be the bowl of pretzels.



More Best of the Worst

• CES 2008 Adwatch: Best of the worst
  
• CES 2008 product names: Best of the worst
• CES 2008 Crapgadget
• CES 2008: Fugliest headphones awards
• The fugliest laptop you'll see all day

Includes iPhone cardboard cutout.

Features include: typing, clicking. Scroll mouse now with moar Ds!

From the weird to the shameless, from the unintentionally funny to the downright questionable, we've rounded up some of the best of the worst ad campaigns seen around the show floor at CES 2008.



More Best of the Worst

• CES 2008 booth gimmickery: Best of the worst
• CES 2008 product names: Best of the worst
• CES 2008 Crapgadget
• The fugliest laptop you'll see all day
• CES 2008: Fugliest headphones awards

We knew we had to have a scoop with the Apple PiePhone.

These cans are just the ticket for some tunes while hunting. The selection committee had an extremely difficult time arbitrating this one, so if you're affronted by what we've relegated to runners-up after the break be sure to cast your vote.

Yeah, yeah, we know -- another iP** dock -- but this is actually one of the first docking audio speakers approved to work with the iPhone without either dropping into airplane mode or assaulting your ears with janky GSM signal noise (it also docks regular old iPods, of course). To boot, it charges the thing and has incoming call support -- more than slightly mitigated by the fact that you still have to actually remove the phone from the dock to take the call, a drawback the Altec Lansing rep said was because Apple neglected to include support for passing call audio across the docking interface. Still, if you happen to use your iPhone as jukebox at home or work, you can pick up this quite decent-sounding speaker system in February if it's worth $200 to you.

Should have... sent... a poet.

Move over, Wii boxing.

We had to check out the potentially miraculous sound of digital noise cancelling in the Sony MDR-NC500D's -- what can we say? They cancel noise. Our finely honed audiophile ears could hear the U2 over the din of the show floor pretty darn well. Was it $400 worth of well? Depends on your annual salary.

We were taken by this innovative iP*** holster in attractive gunmetal finish, spotted at the Pioneer booth/spacepod. Because nothing says commitment like welding your iGadget right to the wall.

Let's be honest, gaming chairs in all flavors of "enhancement" from vibration to sound to cup holders and beyond are quickly becoming a dime a dozen -- but the ButtKicker not only takes a different approach to vibration enhancement than other options but also wins the "most notable name" award in the arena. For one thing, it's not a chair -- it's a device you can install on any office chair to add vibration experience to not just gaming but anything producing sound on your computer including music and other media players. There are also two other versions of the device for use in home theater and auto installations (you can retrofit pretty much any old Lazy-boy in your living room). At $99 the gaming-focused version of the ButtKicker is cheaper than a lot of all-in-one gaming chair solutions as well. Oh, and how does the thing feel? Let's just say it tickled us in many nuanced ways.

Mind you, we've seen no shortage of crazy antics to grab attendee attention out on the show floor (P.T. Barnum would be very, very proud), but this year's award for randomest booth gimmick goes to wall mounting solutions company Vantage Point, who (rather successfully) drew their flock via this oxygen bar in their booth. We did overhear them get a lot of product inquiries out of the deal... about where to buy an oxygen bar (but we're sure the mental road to wall mounting curiosity is super short).

We're still not quite sure whether to file Westinghouse Digital's PumpTop TV network under "because there were a few square inches of advertising-free modern life left" or "because Western civilization demands the right to watch TV absolutely anywhere," but either way we thought it fitting to remind our US readers that these things will start becoming more ubiquitous in major cities this year. The technology isn't new but, much like bell-bottoms, seems to keep coming back unexpectedly despite antipathy from the sane.

We promise this post isn't just a cheap excuse to drool over Halo 3 -- no, no -- this post is a cheap excuse to drool over Crysis running at native resolution. Westinghouse got smarter this year and made its two Quad HD LCDs on display a more prominent attraction in the booth, showing off 47-inch and 56-inch models. For those who haven't been keeping score, the 56-inch display is running at 3840 x 2160 Quad Full HD resolution (think 8.3 million pixels is enough for ya?) -- its little brother runs at 2560 x 1440 Quad HD and 3.7 million pixels. Both of these units are going to be released this year in Q2 ("March or April"), but you'll have to part with $10,000 to pick up the 47-inch and a whopping $50k to take home the 56-inch. The rep we spoke with mentioned they obviously weren't targeting consumers with these things so much as engineers, architects, visual imaging and editing professionals and production studios, and medical and geological professionals, as well as mining companies who've shown interest in the technology. We fully concede there's no rational way to justify shelling out 50 grand for one of these things but damn, it doesn't stop us from wanting one at Engadget HQ.

One day we'll all be taking home automation for granted when every new house on the market includes built-in support for controlling our fireplaces via our watch phones, but until that glorious future arrives the home automation noob has a dizzying array of choices to contend with. We checked out what Control4 has to offer in the way of centralized command over your media, home theater, lights, security system and temperature and found fairly clean, easy to use interfaces coupled with an array of choices for central control and storage depending on the scope of your needs, all compliant with the lovably-named ZigBee wireless standard. Hit the gallery for an overview of Control4 devices and configurations including their Home Controller HC-300 we heard about earlier this year.

Sony invites you to "see it all" at their booth in the Central Hall, but you're hard-pressed to actually do so due to both sheer square footage and the immense volume of bodies jostling each other in between stations. The consumer electronics giant's got no shortage of bedazzling gadgetry out on the floor here, and we braved the teeming hordes to collate the following eye candy for you.

We checked out a working demo version of Skype on the PSP at Sony's booth and are pleased to report that audio quality was pretty decent -- certainly comparable to what we experience when using Skype either on a PC or on the receiving end of one. The only caveat is a bit of lag time in the audio transmission, less than a second but enough to be noticeable. The interface is super simple -- just select the Skype icon and you can see your buddy list of who's online; select someone to ring them up. At the demo station the headset in use was just a regular PSP headset jury-rigged up to the video out jack via the remote control cable -- not something we'll see in production. Since third-party manufacturers will be free to make their own PSP Skype headsets, there should sooner or later be some range of options available for headsets to use according to taste.