We had the chance to get hands-on with Samsung's WiBro-lovin' SWT-W100k back at CES in January. Judging by the arrival of the product waifs, the 4.3-inch, WVGA touchscreen PMP now looks to be getting an official coming-out party in its native S.Korea. €341 takes the little all-purpose device with GPS, 2 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, 8GB of internal flash, and DMB mobile television home on a yet to be determined date. VoIP client, personal organizer, and web browser? Sure, that too. No word on the processor choice but it's definitely not running any flavor of Microsoft OS. With any luck, Samsung will bring a US-specced variant capable of running on Sprint's XOHM service later this year. Video refresher posted after the break.

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

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

No matter where we go, RIM seems to have this same booth style where all the good stuff (the phones, that is) are stuffed in a central nucleus, causing massive crowding. Don't get us wrong, it's entirely possible that's the effect RIM is shooting for, but heaven help us poor journalists try to get a shot of the goods contained within. The Canadian manufacturer didn't have any earth-shattering announcements for the show -- just a couple of new 8130 colors -- so the highlight has to be the giant Pearl that was harassing passers-by. Click on!

We seriously have no idea what Qualcomm was thinking here, but it turns out that those two so-called "Snapdragon prototypes" being shown at CES this year... wait for it... don't use the Snapdragon platform. Now, that would've been just fine with us had Qualcomm made it clear that they were built using its existing chipsets, but they didn't. Here's the best part: Qualcomm actually contacted us with a minor correction on our original story (they wanted us to point out that their ARM-based cores are highly customized) without bothering to mention that our "Snapdragon-powered" statement was not accurate. Anyway, it turns out that the Anchorage and Fairbanks prototypes are merely meant to demonstrate "examples of what Snapdragon-enabled devices will feature," which begs the question: if the current MSM series chipsets are capable of the same functionality, aren't those probably the wrong features to be demonstrating? That behavior walks a fine line between poorly executed PR and outright deception, Qualcomm, and we'd ask that you not let it happen again.

[Thanks, Sascha]

In terms of layout, UTStarcom's booth is close to a dead ringer for its showing at last year's CES; just the promos and handsets have changed, basically. The darlings of the show have to be the HSM180, an absolutely bizarre HSDPA candybar featuring two circles for a keypad, and the TXT8010, a QWERTY slider with an attitude for CDMA networks. Check 'em out, yo.

THTF (which stands for Tsinghua Tongfang, if you must know) is at CES showing its LimePC series of simple, lightweight computers, and we took a particular interest in three of 'em, ordered by size from largest to smallest: the UMPC, HandheldPC, and PalmPC (pictured) models. All three pack an uber-low power mobileGT core from Freescale, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, and touchscreen displays; the Palm PC and HandheldPC feature either 8 or 16GB of Flash, while the UMPC upgrades to a hard drive between 30 and 100GB in capacity. Though both the hardware and the Linux-based software were extremely raw here, we see promise in these totally hackable little beasts -- particularly in the smaller of the two, both of which are totally pocketable. Check out the gallery to see all three doing their thing.

Samsung can join Hitachi while crying into their sake as its 52-inch "thinnest non-OLED HDTV ever" is around 4x as thick as Pioneer's 9mm heroin-chic Kuro. Take heart Sammy, because your 82-inch -- and btw, what is with the 82-inch obsession (2005 & 2006 CES), we need to talk about that -- Quad HD display is like looking out of a window, if we had bigger and cleaner windows. Check out the gallery to see what we mean.

We sat down with one of Qualcomm's fancy new reference designs today, the Anchorage QWERTY slider phone. Let's be perfectly clear -- the Inventec-crafted device won't ever see the light of day in this exact form, Qualcomm just needed some eye candy with which to demonstrate its new Snapdragon platform. The chipset features a highly specialized and customized ARM-based core and graphics from ATI -- both actually licensed this time around, we're told -- and tries to take advantage of as many technologies that Snapdragon offers as possible: MediaFLO support, blazing clock speeds (1GHz to be exact), high resolutions (SVGA here), and the list goes on. Snapdragon-powered devices should hit retail from HTC and Samsung by the end of the year. Click on for pics, just don't get too attached since this is as close as you'll ever get to it, alright?

Avis is showing off its new Where2 portable nav unit this week, a customized Garmin Nuvi 780 that will replace the StreetPilot-based units currently in Avis' arsenal. The software has been mildly reworked to offer routing to Avis rental return locations and the like, but we think the best part of the customization is the bezel. Come on, tell us that red isn't way better than Garmin's own gray? Look for the new units to be available -- by rental only, of course -- in March.