Kevin Maney corresponds: As the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show comes to a close, the adventure has been somewhat sane -- which is a scary sign, as if you could suddenly drive right through Times Square at rush hour.

After years of coming to C.E.S., for the first time ever I walked out of my Las Vegas hotel this morning and immediately hopped into a taxi. The line usually snakes down the sidewalk.

About 140,000 people normally pass through C.E.S. My cabbie said he thinks attendance is down 50 percent from last year. C.E.S. representatives say the numbers are down just 8 percent. I think a lot of people didn't come at the last minute.

My best guess: The crowds are at least 30 percent thinner. I stood in line for only five minutes to get a burger for lunch. In past years, I've waited that long here just to put trash in a garbage can.

The economy, of course, is hitting C.E.S., as it's nailed everything else. Walk the floor, and you'll see acres of big-screen TVs, high-end home theaters, whiz-bang gaming laptops, and expensive smart phones. It's a giant storehouse of stuff that people don't actually need and can put off buying if their livelihoods are in jeopardy.

I stopped by the Garmin booth, where they showed me a really cool handheld GPS gadget designed just for playing golf. It's loaded with detailed maps of half the golf courses in America. It can show you exactly where you are on a course, the distance to the green, the best way to plan your shots. It costs $499.

The kind of people who have both time for golf and an extra $499 to spend on a device which is only good for golf has probably dwindled quite a lot in the past six months.

There's certainly some cool stuff around. I stopped by LG's booth and saw one of the many examples of the biggest crowd-drawing technology here: OLED screens. (That stands for organic light-emitting diodes.) It's a technology originally developed by Kodak.

The screens show super-bright, high-definition images -- better than anything you've ever seen -- on a screen as thin as a few pieces of paper. The technology is so expensive to make, the first screens are the size of a couple of Pop-Tarts and cost $1,000 or more.

Again -- probably not a good bet in this economic environment.

The folks from Ericsson told me about the "kill pill" they developed for laptops. If a laptop has an Ericsson chip that connects to wireless networks, and your computer is stolen, you can text your machine and make it lock up. That seems like a good idea.

For a while now, I'd been thinking that someone needs to invent a way for me to unlock my house door with my cell phone. Keys seem so archaic.

When I stopped by the BlackBerry booth, they showed me an application that lockmaker Schlage created to do just that. You could even unlock your door remotely -- say, to let in a cable guy. Schlage kind of ruined it, though, by giving the product an overblown geeky name: Intelligent Residential Security. Gag me.

Just before leaving for the day, I discovered the absolute worst product at C.E.S. This would be Crocs for your cell phone. Yep. Little crocs meant to be phone carrying cases. They're called Crocs-o-dial. No one over seven years old should ever be caught with one.