I’ve had a little time to mull over my CES experience and form some thoughts about it. The show itself is more than a little overwhelming; it’s hard to express its scale, and the difficulty in shuttling between its different locations, on and off the Las Vegas Strip, doesn’t help things a whole lot. In terms of mobile, after a few years where CES had gained some importance on the product announcement schedule, it was very quiet this year. There were plenty of accessories and other stuff, but not a whole lot on the handset front. I think this has a lot to do with 3GSM (er, MWC) and CTIA coming up in the next few months, and a realization by phone vendors that they’re just another bit of noise in the overall din of CES.

There were several things I saw that are worth noting, though:

Both 3M and Texas Instruments were showing off picoprojectors, with 3M’s in a small demo unit and TI’s built into a mockup handset. Both said that actual products using their tiny projectors would be on the market later this year, so Russell’s prediction looks like it will come true. Both the demos worked pretty well, even with all the ambient light from the show floor, and the projectors themselves seem viable — but it’s not clear how they’ll impact battery life or other factors. Still, there is a narrow use case that these devices should prove attractive to, and they should become more popular over the next few years.

“Mobile Internet Devices” — something falling between a smartphone and a laptop — were fairly popular. I was surprised that there were so few electronic devices featuring mobile data connections at CES, and these were some of the only ones. This is a space that’s getting a lot of interest, both from Intel, which is pushing MIDs hard, and the likes of Nokia with its internet tablets, while even Apple with its tiny new MacBook Air. I’m a little skeptical of the overall appeal of these devices, but as the form factors improve and costs come down, I could see them becoming popular as PC companions rather than laptop replacements. That said, it’s still very early days for this space, and the products still need refining. Some of the Intel-based units, for example, were running Windows Vista. Is that really the best environment for a tiny and somewhat underpowered device? But there are some compelling early products here, such as the Asus eeePC Sprint was showing off with embedded WiMAX.

You know you’re a mobile dork when you get excited by something like Sony’s TransferJet technology. I think it’s best described as Bluetooth without the pain. The demo on the Sony stand used a digital camera and a home media server; when the camera was set on top of the server, the photos stored on it were transferred across at speeds of up to 560 Mbps. No pairing, no passcodes, just a very quick and very easy transfer. The only security is proximity — in this example, the assumption is that if somebody can get close enough to the server to set a camera on it, that they’ve got permission to transfer photos to it. While this is a Sony proprietary technology, they say they want to standardize it and license it out to other companies — something I’d like to see. Parrot, which makes a lot of Bluetooth accessories, was showing off some new digital photo frames which use NFC to establish a Bluetooth connection and pair the frame with a phone. It’s clear that people are realizing Bluetooth isn’t always user-friendly and are looking to solve the pain, which is great.

I was also impressed with Yahoo’s new mobile announcements. There’s plenty to argue over about the Yahoo Go! application, but I like how Yahoo will take the widgets a developer designs and run them both within Go and over the mobile web. Yes, it’s more fragmentation, but Yahoo does have a tremendous reach, so its audience could prove attractive.

There was also a fair amount of talk about using sidebands of digital TV transmissions in the US to offer mobile TV broadcasts. There are competing standards in this space, so a lot could go wrong, but the idea of free mobile TV provided by local broadcasters — as opposed to paid services through mobile operators — is an interesting one. If operators continue to have a hard time selling mobile TV, this could take off.

Finally, to answer a couple of reader questions:

– Jim Hughes wanted “a great overview of the entire American “wireless” scene; trying to understand an audience that apparently buy Moto, Palm, and WinMo phones willingly is an alien concept to most of us.” I think that’s probably best left to a post of its own, but briefly, the US handset market is dominated by operators and their subsidies. Operators don’t offer a great number of handsets that are advanced by European standards, and when they do, they often come at a very high price to consumers. Furthermore, there hasn’t been much marketing muscle put behind mobile data services from operators, so there’s little awareness or demand for high-spec handsets or smartphones that are built for them. The exceptions to this are push email and “business” devices like BlackBerrys, Treos and WinMo handsets — and of course the iPhone, which itself is helping to change perceptions.

– Ric Ferraro wanted to know about inbuilt GPS in the US. There wasn’t a lot of talk about this at the show directly, but it should be noted that a good number of US CDMA handsets already feature AGPS or other location technologies. It seems largely inevitable that the market is moving such that GPS will be pretty standard in a few years; the question that remains is just what — beyond navigation — it will be used for.

He also asked about mobile payments: “could you provide some insight into whether the NFC/contactless technology is being discussed at the CES and whether any manufacturer is bold enough to talk about the future of the mobile wallet?” There was very little on this front. The NFC Forum had a stand in the (relatively) low-rent district of the Sands Expo center, and that was pretty much it. This is an area where the technology appears to be ready, but commercial concerns are holding it back. Perhaps this year will see some movement on some fronts, like building the ability to pay for public transport into some handsets, but by the end of the year, it’s hard to see more than a very few people outside Japan paying for things with their phones.