Last month I was lucky enough to be chosen to appear on the call-in episode of Tech News Today on the TWiT network. It was a very cool experience that involved me talking with Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane and Iyaz Akhtar over Skype, chatting about my passion for tech, how it wraps into my life as a Jesuit and generally shooting the uberGeek breeze.

While at CES, I ran into the TNT crew once again and this time Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane and I lamented over the lack of any real game-changers at the show. It was a quick 5 minutes video segment in between filming Energizer power packs and my crew watching me repeatedly fall off of a mechanical bull.

With all the high-tech wonderment that comprises most of CES, it’s nice to occasionally chat with a vendor who offers a product that simply makes something better. That’s definitely the case with Wrapsol.

We bumped into them at Showstoppers CES 2012 and got a close look at their “Grip Pad.” — This oval piece of non-slip material adheres to the back of your tablet device and makes it “sticky”- capable of resting on inclined surfaces of all types and materials.

From their press release: BOSTON, MALAs Vegas, (January 10, 2012, from ShowStoppers @ CES 2012) – Wrapsol, a leader in protection solutions for consumer electronics, today introduced its newest product in protective films technologyfilms technology – the Wrapsol non-slip Grip Pad. The Grip Pad is made with tactillaTM, a proprietary gripping technology, made from advanced high durability polyurethane. The Grip Pad is the first product to integrate Wrapsol’s non-slip, tactillaTM technology.

If you’re like me, your desktop and drawers are filled with business cards, bits of paper, “important” letters and receipts that need to be processed in some fashion. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single piece of technology that could scan, categorize, and keep those bits of data in a usable format?

We stopped by the Neat table at Showstoppers CES 2012 to take a look at their Neat Receipts and Neat Desk products. They’re designed to let users in the office on or the go organize their paper as quickly as it comes in. They claim that it uses a combination of scanning hardware, OCR software and parsing intelligence to make the product smart enough to know how to file your bits of data.

While wandering through the CES hotness that is “Digital Experience” we happened across a Faraday cage at the Wilson Electronics table. Wilson, a company known for making cellular signal boosters for your home and office, was trying to recreate what happens when you take your shiny new cellphone and bring it into the metal, signal-killing box that we call our cars. Their newest product, the “Sleek 4G” is a cool device that is designed to give signal back to those who want more bars in the box.

To break it down even more: phone gets signal out of the box, but not inside the box. So what do you do? make a device that takes the signal outside of the box, and repeats it inside. It’s a simple concept and a product worth a look.

If you haven’t been following the SOPA drama, it’s a misguided attempt to shutdown piracy sites by breaking the Domain Name System (DNS) that runs the Internet: it’s the equivalent of deterring car theft by removing all of the world’s street signs… and it makes just about as much sense.

For just a minute, you can forget the hushed, rushed hearings and the desperate attempt by Rep. Lamar (R-Texas) to push through the bill before recess. For just a minute you can ignore the fact that SOPA would remove due-process. For just a minute you can close your eyes to the fact that SOPA wouldn’t stop piracy… and just acknowledge that this is what happens when the technologically illiterate try to make laws governing technology.

The coolest tech we found was at the Samsung booth. Between their Galaxy Note (see the picture to the left) and their MHL enabled Series 5 & 7 monitors, they cornered the “gotta have it” tech for the next year.

The Samsung Galaxy Note is, to put it bluntly, a tablet that doubles as a phone. In the picture you can see it compared to an Applie iPhone 4s and there is just no comparison between the amount of screen space each offers. It also comes with all the features and functions that have made the Galaxy S2 one of the hottest selling smartphones of all times, including MHL.

Follow us on a little walk through the Samsung, Microsoft and Intel booths to see the things that caught the eye of the uberGeek Padre!