Icrontic is heading to sunny Las Vegas this coming January for the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. We made a big splash last year, got some great coverage on many awesome gadgets and products, and we’ve got even bigger plans for 2010.

In addition to having more troops on the floor with the addition of Cliff Forster and Lincoln Russell to our coverage team, yours truly was recently tapped to sit on the judging panel for Last Gadget Standing.

Last Gadget Standing is known as a “supersession“, and last year it was the largest supersession. Half entertainment spectacle, half prescient prediction of what will be hot for the coming year, the LGS show has grown in popularity every year and is on track to be the largest at CES 2010 as well.

Judges submit finalists for the hottest gadgets of the show, and they are voted on by attendees in the audience as well as on the website during the show. The nominees use whatever tactics they can to entice the audience to cheer for their gadgets, whether it means hiring Elvis impersonators, dumping dirt on the audience (as Roomba did one year), or throwing free swag to the crowd. It is, after all, entertainment.

Here are some of the trends we’re looking forward to at CES 2010 and LGS:

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is going to be the hot stuff for 2010. Applications such as Wikitude and SekaiCamera are already available for  iPhone and Android, and a recent video from BMW showing an augmented reality mechanic’s application made waves on the internet. The term “airtagging” is already in the vernacular. If that doesn’t say something, we don’t know what does.

Video Game Motion Control

As usual, Nintendo blazed a trail with their Wiimote controller; the fact that they codenamed it “Revolution” should say something. Sony was quick to tag along with their “me too!” attempt at tacked-on motion control in the SixAxis controller, but recently made a more mature attempt with their PS3 Wand demos. Microsoft, however, is going to take the cake this year with Project Natal. Forgoing any attempt at awkward peripherals, they are eschewing all handheld doohickeys with a camera-based, full body control system that seems to not suck.

Cloud Computing

More and more, important aspects of our lives are moving into “the cloud”; the nebulous network of servers, applications, and services that we almost take for granted. Applications like Google’s Gmail, Valve’s Steam, and Dropbox serve to remind us that computing is taking place less and less on our desktops and more and more “out there, somewhere” in the dataverse. Cloud computing is big stuff, and the idea that our digital lives can be accessed anywhere, at any time, on a multitude of devices is extremely compelling. Your music library in your car? Your video games on a mini screen while you’re on a flight? We’re excited to see what 2010 is going to usher in.

Storage Revolution

SSD (Solid State Drives) have been perpetually “coming soon”, but we feel that 2010 is going to be the breakout year for this hot tech. Mechanical hard drives are noisy, hot, prone to wear and tear, and complicated. Solid State Drive technology is finally ready for prime time. With prices dropping rapidly, reliability going way up, and performance rapidly outpacing even the fastest mechanical hard drives, it seems as if 2010 will be the year that the death knell for mechanical drives rang out.

Windows 7

There is no denying it. Microsoft Windows Vista was a bomb–so let’s move on. 2010 will be the year of Windows 7, and judging by the public reaction to the release candidate (a term that wasn’t even known by all but the most hardcore nerds until recently), Windows 7 is going to be Microsoft’s most popular operating system ever. Microsoft has done everything exactly the right way with Windows 7. From engineering, to marketing, to PR, it seems as if Microsoft has finally come together as a cohesive company to present a unified front to the computing world. Windows 7 seems to be the kind of operating system that will garner actual fans, sort of like what Apple has with Mac freaks.

Trends such as miniaturization, connectivity, high fidelity, and high definition were big in the first decade of the 2000s. We like to see all of those things as “growing pains” leading to the second decade of the 21st century. Things are finally coming together. All the elements are in place to make fantastic, futuristic, wondrous things happen in technology–things that will be available for actual consumers, not just seen in laboratories.

We’re looking forward to pitting them against each other live, on-stage at CES.