Yup! It’s that time of the year again. I am headed for Las Vegas, to scan the halls of the #1 annual electronics bonanza – CES – short for Consumer Electronics Show.

Probably the key highlight for this year’s show – more electronics OEMs find religion in portable mobility. As far as exhibitors’ new devices announcements go, the excitement is virtually palpable.

Especially with 4G connectivity helping to better connect them all.

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It’s frustrating being a part-time blogger.

It happens again and again – I get interested in a bit of news, I think to myself “I should write something on that”, I make a few notes, and I plan to get back to it in a day or two when I’m less busy.  Meanwhile, though, the story continues to evolve, and one of two things happen:

• What I intended to write actually pans out (in which case  my remarkably insightful observations come off reading more like “I knew that would happen…” than the pearls of digitalmissive wisdom they could have been)

…or…

• What I intended to write turns out to be exactly wrong (in which case I guess I’m lucky to have not gotten around to writing anything in the first place).

Such is the case with the iPad.

We first reported on the device over a year ago (here) – but since the device has become a reality, we haven’t had the the time to keep up (other than to make a quick observation on how the launch-day twitterati predicted how short-lived the immediate bump in Apple’s stock price would be here).

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We’ve been watching (and writing) about the rumored Apple tablet netbook for a while now – essentially an iTouch with a 6-10″ touch screen, we feel like this thing is gonna be huge.

Hulu’s been working on an iPhone App (using the more Apple-friendly MP4 format rather than than Adobe Flash) for a few months now – imagine a 10″ tablet for the home that can access iTunes, YouTube and Hulu.  Imagine all this running over your fast home internet connection rather than AT&T’s under-performing 3G data network.  Imagine (the admittedly more remote) possibility of the otherwise Microsoft-centric Netflix streaming service coming to the iPhone OS as well.

In short, this could be one compelling consumer electronics internet video device.

We had speculated on a holiday 2009 release, but recenty the Financial Times reported the iTouch tablet/netbook might hit as soon as September. There’s one (as yet unsolved) problem most of the somewhat breathless coverage of this device fails to mention, though:

Battery Life.

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