Inputs of All Shapes, Sizes Vie for Last Gadget Attention

There's always something vying to plunge our plain old keyboards into oblivion. But few stand up to the challenge. Nintendo broke the mold with the Wii's motion-sensing controller. ViaVoice from IBM came as close to good speech-to-text as possible. Pen computing has come and gone countless times, re-emerging early next year as Livescribe's smartpen.

This year's Last Gadget input device challengers include some pretty crazy items and a few big surprises that we can't mention yet.

GAMERS INPUT

I'm not so sure I'd run out to buy a keypad that separated the keys I used for typing from the keys I used for gaming, but no doubt someone will. The dual puck look of the WolfKing WARRIOR XXTREME (yes, that's the spelling) combines a circular 54-key disc with 40 additional keys in a modified QWERTY arrangement on a second attached disc. Detach the mini-keyboard and you can go to battle unencumbered by extraneous letters. No design detail has been spared: two Ctrl keys for different-sized hands, backlighting for low-light conditions, built-in volume control, and two USB ports make this a serious FPS (first-person shooter) or RPG (role-playing game) delight.

VOICE AND MUSIC

Anyone who's ever made a recording or podcast knows the frustration of the lag between talking into the microphone and listening to your headphones. A simple twist, but M-Audio's Session Music Producer has a headphone jack built into the microphone so that there's nothing but real-time listening. And it's a USB microphone. The microphone is packaged with M-Audio's Session recording software and has an on-board ASIO (Audio Streaming Input and Output) driver, which is the standard audio driver used in professional recording. I've used this microphone for podcasting, and for $99, it does an amazing job and requires few tech skills.

PRINTED PAPER AS INPUT

Chris Null, Dory Devlin, and I don't always agree, but we're all fans of NEAT Receipts, a scanning system that helps you stay organized at home, at work, and on the go. It takes your bits of paper and scans them into an organized system. At CES, the company will be showing off Version 3.0. It will take a business card, scan it, and then sync with Outlook, ACT!, and Plaxo to keep your address book up-to-date. Receipts from a trip? It'll now turn the information into a spreadsheet that can be exported into Excel templates. Then sort taxable receipts by category and run reports to send the information to TurboTax. Bonus: You can send IRS-accepted digital copies of your receipts as a PDF or JPEG. The product retails for $229.95.

A MOBILE INPUT DEVICE

What if you can't stay in one place long enough to input anything but want to control everything? Logitech is showing the newest version of its Harmony universal remote control. I've called this device the "marriage therapist" because it reduces the number of remotes required to watch a movie to one (after your husband installed the home theatre with four remotes as minimum movie requirement).

The first Logitech Harmony was black and white and expensive all over ($500). The new one is still $500, but adds a color screen and backlit buttons, so "remoting" is easy even in a dark bedroom. Harmony knows about more than 5,000 brands of electronics and can even control temperature and room lighting (Z-Wave compatible). Just tell it the model of the digital gadget you use, and it will store the button-press sequences in its memory. You can replace up to 15 remotes and navigate all your devices from a single easy-to-understand panel. Watch Becky Worley's walkthrough of the Harmony 1000.

THE CORDLESS PEN

Iogear's digital pens have been around for awhile, but the newest, The Digital Scribe, is cordless. You do your writing and scribbling on plain old (non-proprietary) paper. Every pen stroke is input into the Digital Scribe. To transfer it to the PC, you use a USB receiver attached to the PC—no cords required. Think of the pen as a superscanner that can upload to a USB receiver and then use OCR software to translate your scribbles into digital text and you won't be very far off.

For more on The Last Gadget Standing, see some of the new wireless devices.