Here's a peek at some of our tech reporters' favorite gadgets unveiled at CES in Vegas.

Motorola Xoom

The Motorola Xoom tablet has a few features not seen on many other tablets — no buttons, 4G capabilities and even a barometer.

The barometer, which measures atmospheric pressure and can help forecast the weather, is a unique inclusion and might make the Xoom the tablet of choice for meteorologists.

Set to release in the first quarter of the year through Verizon stores, Xoom will also be the first tablet to ship with Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, Motorola Mobility said. A price hasn't been announced.

Honeycomb is the first build of Android tailored for tablets, in contrast to previous versions that were built for smart phones and ported over to the larger slate devices.

Motorola has found success with its Droid and Droid X smart phones running Google's Android and is pitching the Xoom as the first dual-core processor tablet and “the first official tablet from Google.”

It will feature a 10.1-inch screen that can play back high-definition 1080p video, a camera on the front with Google Talk chatting, a 5-megapixel camera on the back for photos and 720p HD video. And an HDMI output will allow connection to an HDTV.

Two more after the jump >>

Around the world, a new community of hackers is coming together to take the Microsoft Kinect far beyond the videogame. Created for the Xbox 360 to enable controller-less game play, the Kinect's combination of sophisticated sensors and affordable price are opening up new possibilities for technophiles working in art, filmmaking, robotics and music. The open source movement springing up around the console is inspiring innovation, laying the groundwork for a fundamental change in how we interact with technology.

After the Kinect's November U.S. release, a race to crack it began. Motivated by a $2,000 prize promised by hardware kit company Adafruit Industries, open source enthusiasts frenetically got to work.

In true hacker spirit, Adafruit upped the bounty to $3,000 after Microsoft issued an ominous statement to CNET, stating that they would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

A mere six days after the console was unleashed, hacker Hector Marcan broke through and uploaded his code. After submitting to Adafruit, Marcan also posted on the OpenKinect project — the center of the current cyclone of innovation founded by interface engineer Joshua Blake.

An open community of hackers, engineers and artists, OpenKinect is a communal effort to use the Kinect hardware with PCs and other devices with free, open source code.

How members decide to use this code is completely up to them. As a result, the Kinect has already been used in countless ways its creators never anticipated, from real-time 3D sculpting to creating a giant virtual piano, with new examples being uploaded to YouTube each day.

For Blake, who studied non-traditional interfaces in college and has been designing and developing applications for the Microsoft Surface software platform since 2008, starting the OpenKinect project was his way of pushing for change in the way we interact with computers.

Blake said that when he started OpenKinect, he “anticipated that perhaps a couple dozen, maybe a hundred people eventually, would join my OpenKinect mailing list and maybe we would put out a few neat concept videos. Instead there were hundreds and thousands interested. Right now there are more than 1,650 people on the mailing list.”

Plenty more after the jump >>

Sierra Madre's lone townie bar, the Buccaneer, is about to get its first glimpse of formal wear. A roving party bus occupied by 20- and 30-somethings gussied up in tuxedos and gowns is slated to arrive. The game for the evening is to tell inquisitive bar denizens that the party is celebrating the launch of its faux-company, Pet Heads, an organization that provides medical marijuana for pets. But most of the tuxedo clad pack made up of engineers, mad scientists, designers and entrepreneurs might as well be celebrating the launch of their own company, Syyn Labs.

Syyn Labs is a local artist collective of self-proclaimed geeks that has produced projects for Santa Monica's Glow festival, the rock group OK Go, Sears, Disney and Google, among others. They are most famous for their creation of the Rube Goldberg machine for OK Go's video “This Too Shall Pass”, but the team's real signature is taking on insanely difficult challenges and producing stunning creations that blur the line between art and technology.

There's no Cristal being poured on Syyn's party bus, but you will see plenty of tequila, the occasional flash of a silk stockinged leg and lots of glittery disco lights. Continue reading >>

Blogger Corina Mackay has the full story of how Dutch airline KLM came to be offering a one time only direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami for the Ultra Music Festival, all thanks to Twitter.   After Dutch filmmaker Wilco Jung challenged the airline via Twitter, as seen above, the airline took him up on his challenge, saying that if Jung and Dutch DJ Sied van Riel could fill a flight with reservations from dance music industry professionals by December 6th, KLM would provide the plane.  Well, the flight reportedly filled up in 5 hours - those Dutchmen do love their pounding dance music - and KLM will honor the bargain by adding a direct flight to Miami.  Social media to the rescue.

-- Daniel Siegal

Photo: Screencapture of the Twitter post that started it all.

ENESS, an Australian collective of interactive designers and "old-time skaters," jumped at the chance to bring some high-tech magic to the ol' half pipe as part of the Tron: Legacy premiere at the IMAX at the Melbourne Museum.  Check this video to see how these electronic wizards, with a custom-built steel ramp and iPods loaded with specialized software, manage to bring a slice of Tron's world into our reality.

-- Daniel Siegal

Put solar panels where it's sunny, wind farms where it's windy. If only it were that simple.

Choosing the best sites for renewable energy projects is a challenge for clean-power developers; selecting the right location and securing permits can take months, even years. That's because seemingly prime parcels may have endangered species, tricky topography or poor access to transmission lines. The local government could be hostile to incentive programs. Banks and utilities need to know exactly how much power is going to come off a site hour by hour and how much money it will make — none of it evident without a deep dive by lawyers and investigators.

Now a former gaming executive believes that he has come up with a way to do it faster and more cheaply using the 3-D animation modeling that helped make the video game the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion into a big hit and a ray-tracing technology used on the “Toy Story” movies. Continue reading >>

A few weeks ago, Dublab, the L.A.-based DJ collective and online radio station, tweeted a little note about one of the upcoming mixtapes that they drop from time to time. The collections, which vary from odd, ethereal soundscape cassettes to CD compilations of, say, freaky Bollywood sounds of the 1960s and 1970s, usually nail it, mostly because the individual members are music headz true and true.

But the tweet that piqued interest had to do with the format that one of their upcoming mixes will be released on: a little thing called Playbutton. Playbutton is a pin with an earphone jack that you affix to your lapel, or jean jacket, or best silk blouse. The pin itself is an MP3 player that holds an entire full-length mixtape. Just pin it on and plug the buds into your ears and, bingo, you're set. Playbutton packs a rechargable lithium battery in its stainless-steel casing, and the button exterior can be designed as album art. According to Playbutton's website, the music on the pin is pre-recorded, and can't be downloaded or changed: “Like an album, the sequence of the music can't be altered.”

With music now untethered from the stereo, these little gifts of music strike us as a quirky, smart way for artists to get their music to the masses. Will it take off? Who knows? But with production starting this month, the little device has garnered ample attention.

-- Randall Roberts

Photo: A Playbutton in action. Credit: Courtesy Playbutton.co.

Apple has a big announcement (aren't they all?) scheduled for Tuesday morning -- and according to the Wall Street Journal, that announcement will be the arrival of the Fab Four in the iTunes store. The Beatles' catalog, which underwent a handsome remastering and reissue last year, has long been absent from the digital retailer thanks to a number of reported disagreements, making the act the store's biggest holdout. So, should John, Paul, George and Ringo reach the end of the long and winding road to iTunes, it feels like a big deal -- but is it?

"Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget," iTunes' site trumpets today, but the privilege of being able to buy digital versions of 40-year-old albums by the world's most popular band hardly seems like a historic occasion. Whether or not you (or your dad) already own the entire Beatles catalog, the 2009 reissues are well worth paying for, but if you care enough about sound quality to spring for the remastered versions, you should buy the CDs and rip them yourself for maximum fidelity. The Beatles' discography remains arguably the greatest the rock genre's ever produced -- songs such as "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" should make you reach for a tissue, not for the bass boost. We don't endorse piracy, of course, but hi-def rips -- higher than iTunes' will be, at any rate -- of the remasters have been circulating among file-sharers since their release.

With record stores shuttering and CD sales increasingly down, a presence in popular online retailers like the iTunes store is certainly becoming more and more important, but what do you think, Brand Xers? Has the Beatles' iTunes holdout really been keeping you from treading down "Abbey Road" all these years? Or have you discovered other methods of digital music-finding beyond Steve Jobs' store?

-- David Greenwald

Photo: The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964. Credit: Associated Press

The eerie whisper of a ghost in your right ear. The pitter-patter of rain pelting your umbrella. The whistle of bullets screeching past your face.

Get ready for the next leap forward in movie theater technology: 3-D sound.

At least that's the hope of a German software company that has spent 15 years and $20 million developing a system that aims to do for audio what 3-D has done for screen images.

Continue reading after the jump >>

"I'm typing so ... hard I might break my ... Mac book Air!!!!!!!!" Kanye West once blogged. If he'd had the latest model, he actually might have. Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed the new version of the company's most Kate Moss-like laptop at an Apple event on Wednesday, with the slimmed-down version a mere "2.9 pounds and is less than 3/4'' thick at its thickest point," according to our Technology blog colleagues -- and that's for the bigger, 13" version.

Also on the way is a new operating system, Lion (the follow-up to Snow Leopard -- Jobs, like your blogger, is apparently a cat person). It'll arrive in summer 2011 and will include FaceTime, allowing users to make video calls to compatible iPhones and iPods. We’d suggest having more real-life face-to-face time if that one sounds like a must-have feature, but we’ll probably end up crumbling to our Apple overlords and using it to talk to Mom.

-- David Greenwald

What do you think, Brand Xers? Impressed by Apple's latest? Or will you leave the MacBook Air to Yeezy?

Photo: Steve Jobs with the two MacBook Air models captured from Apple's webcast of the announcement.