LAS VEGAS -- She looked so giddy about her "innovation" as she beckoned passersby into the booth, it seemed almost rude to brush her aside. And then, when she actually explained what the innovation was, it became necessary to listen just to make sure she wasn't kidding.

She wasn't. The sales rep for Rocky Mountain Radar, whose name makes little sense considering it's based in El Paso, Texas, was in fact hawking the world's first bilingual radar detector.

Huh? Beyond the question of how much conversation motorists need to have with their beepy little cop-defying devices, it didn't seem all that remarkable that the machine could record whatever utterances it says in English in another tongue, too.

"Yes, but this is the first time it's been done," Rocky Mountain Radar sales manager Brett McArdle insisted.

Hmmph. If you say so.

The mammoth show floors at the 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas are bustling with the newest, the latest and the coolest technology on the planet. And yet in the breathless race to impress, the Las Vegas Convention Center can leave the visitor as underwhelmed as overwhelmed. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but then perhaps desperation is the mother of invention marketing.

Small-name brands aren't immune to overhype, either. Stop by the enormous area for Pioneer Electronics USA and ask about the newest in plasma televisions, for instance. You'll learn about its 50-inch and 43-inch sets with built-in high-definition capabilities, which come to market in a few months. They're "one of the first," spokesman Aaron Levine notes. But if so, that's one crowded freshman class. Across the aisle, Daewoo Electronics is showing off a 60-incher with the same capability, although the Daewoo spokesman admitted that not many are buying 60-inch plasma sets because they cost upward of $15,000.

It's a wonder, sometimes, why the big manufacturers include some of their less-flashy equipment in their presentations. A woman on the Panasonic lot ran through a spiel about a set of intriguing gadgets, from a security camera you can view from the Internet to a 6-pound portable 4,800-dpi color photo printer.

But her enthusiasm seemed misplaced when she pointed out a new portable telephone with the "amazing" ability to offer four ring tones, three melody rings and two slots for downloading songs from the Internet to use for rings. One guy observing the lecture looked down at his 3-year-old Nokia cell phone, which has dozens of ring-tone choices in it, including a couple his 11-year-old niece had invented, and shrugged.

Oftentimes, the overblown or overly enthusiastic claims of those touting tech wares crumble under minimal inspection. The Mito Corp. of Elkhorn, Indiana, had a rep begging reporters to check out its AudioBUG, a golf-ball-size, mouse-shaped device that plugs into an iPod, DVD player or some other audio device. Users turn a nearby radio to a certain frequency and the sound comes out of the radio, making it particularly useful in the car.

That might seem intriguing, but at least two other manufacturers make the same gizmo, as Mito sales representative Tim O'Connell acknowledged when asked. His product is different, though, he noted, because it shuts itself off in 60 seconds when not in use. Wow.

Still, some technological innovations that on the surface seem ridiculous actually look better upon closer inspection.

Hy-Tek Manufacturing offers the "largest universal remote control available," a 12-ounce hunk of plastic that requires four batteries and has buttons that are nearly an inch across. The impulse to mock the device was overwhelming, but then product manager Donna Bastian explained that the family-owned, Chicago-based company developed it because her aged father-in-law's glaucoma and arthritis made it difficult for him to use the tiny buttons on the ever-shrinking standard remotes.