Digital and bedazzling: Sky's the limit for newest wave of tech gadgets

So, you' re tired of watching TV in the living room. You've long since become bored watching TV on your home computer. By now, you may even have found watching shows on a handheld video player so five-minutes-ago.

Well, iWear provides another option, putting iPod video onto tiny screens about an inch from your eyeballs but nonetheless replicating the experience of watching on a 44-inch screen viewed from 9 feet away.

The iWear is part of the newest wave of "take your tech with you" consumer electronics devices, mini-but-mighty products aimed at user flexibility — giving them the ability to decide when and where to work or play.

They're a passel of puny, powerful, personal products.

"It's about having content anywhere," Jim Barry, spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, said last week during his annual media tour touting the latest and greatest in consumer tech gadgets. "Digital technology allows these things to get smaller and smaller and less expensive, and we can take all this stuff with us. We can take our movies and music and entertainment and work — if you've got to — with you wherever you want to go."

In the case of the iWear ($250) from Vuzix, formerly Icuiti, users can enjoy video just about anywhere. Just plug in an iPod — some iWear models are for portable DVD players — and the 230,000-pixel LCD screens come alive in the front of the wrap-around video glasses with ear buds. Powered by the iPod, they need no extra power pack and the system weighs a mere 4 ounces.

For on-the-go technology that allows you to know where you're going, check out the Harmon/Kardon Guide + Play ($400). It's a combination video player, music player and GPS navigation device.

"One of the trends we talk about is convergence, which can mean a number of things, but with handheld devices, it means a number of different uses in a single handheld or pocket-type device," Barry said.

Remember when shoulder-breaking boomboxes were "the" way to listen to music? The definition of "portable" certainly has changed since then. One example is the Samsung K5 MP3 player ($180), which is little but loud, thanks to a built-in, slide-out set of speakers — still a rarity among MP3 players. What's more, the the K5 also plays FM radio signals.

The boombox analog on the video side was the shoulder-mounted videotape recorder, long before the term "camcorder" was coined. Now videographers can avoid tapes altogether but using the RCA EZ201 Small Wonder ($129), which is not much bigger than a pack of cards but can record an hour of video on flash memory for later downloads to a computer via USB connection. An SD expansion slot can provide up to four hours of video recording time.