5 Technologies CES 2012 Just Killed

CES gadgets can make 3-D replicas, smarten up your car and make almost all the technology in your house slimmer and flatter, but they can't stop your old tech toys from becoming obsolete.

The CES carnage may not be as clear as it was last year, when a flood of tablets drowned the minor netbook presence on the floor, but the fallout from this year's offerings will be no less pronounced. Judging by the top products at this year's show, integration is still the one constant at CES.That's great for the companies putting five gadgets' worth of functions into products smaller than your fist and consumers whose bandolier of tech products now fits in their back pocket. It's not such great news for companies caught behind the curve or late-adopting consumers waiting for technological advances to pause long enough for them to catch their breath or recoup enough funds to get the next big thing.We took a look at the top trends at CES and found five products that the show effectively bid farewell to in 2012. Their demise may not be immediate, but consider the following products on deathwatch:

Laptop-sized laptopsAs soon as the industry substituted "Ultrabook" for "product that will compete with Apple's(AAPL) MacBook Air" in the tech lexicon, the laptop went on a crash diet. The majority of laptops on the market in 2011 weighed 4.5 pounds or more after resisting the urge to shrink down to netbook size. After H-P(HPQ) launched its super-skinny Envy, Lenovo countered with its svelte IdeaPad U310 and U410 Ultrabooks, notoriously clunky Dell(DELL) dropped weight with its XPS 13 and Acer unveiled an Intel-powered Aspire S5 that it's declared the world's thinnest Ultrabook, the goal weight is now below 3 pounds.The pricing is where it gets tricky. H-P's Envy starts at $1,399, which makes it about $400 more costly than an entry-level MacBook Air. Lenovo's pre-CES X1 Hybrid fetches a slightly less competitive $1,599. The real challenge to Air comes from Lenovo's T430 ThinkPad ($849) and Dell's XPS 13 ($999), which at least inspire some second thought with competitive sticker prices. The old-timer holdouts will grouse about absent optical drives, lightweight memory and heavy reliance on the cloud. But external CD/DVD drives go for as little as $40. Companies such as Seagate and Netgear are making wireless and cloud storage as simple as hard drives. Feel free to hang on to that heavier hardware as long as you'd like, but the portable options for consumers who aren't taken with tablets are getting slimmer.

Slab-sized televisionsThe laptops aren't the only tech devices that resolved to drop a few sizes in 2012.Flatscreen televisions flattened out at CES this year, with the acronym-heavy 55-inch LG 3D OLED packing a brilliant passive 3-D display into a window pane-thin screen. Unlike many of its big-promise television counterparts, though, the LG OLED will actually be consumer-ready by the third quarter. Bang & Olufsen offer a more upmarket option with their slight 65-inch BeoVison 3-D-capable television.The strongest argument for thinning out your television, however, was made by Samsung. Its OLED 55-inch Smart TV is a wispy 0.6 of an inch thin. That's just a throw-in feature.The TV has both voice and facial recognition, motion-control capability and Wi-Fi connectivity.The Smart TV's moneymaker, however, is the ability to upgrade your TV every couple of years when more features become available. Its Smart Evolution allows consumers whose streaming service has gone bankrupt or who are looking for more gadget integration to swap out the old for new via a slot in the back. Spending only a few hundred dollars every few years or so instead of thousands when a TV becomes functionally obsolete is an idea even the most curmudgeonly consumer coarsened by ever-changing television technology can get behind.

Set-top boxesNo offense to Dish Network's(DISH) Hopper DVR, Vizio and Sony(SNE) GoogleTV(GOOG) Blu-ray player and set-top boxes or Simple.TV's DVR, but the days of daisy-chained living room devices are nearing their demise.Samsung's Smart TV is certainly one example of where integration is heading (especially after announcing a partnership with DirecTV(DTV) that cuts out that company's box altogether), but Panasonic is also still pursuing all-in-one television tech. Even peripheral producers such as Roku are getting less boxy, as Roku has streamlined all of its functions into one dongle-sized Streaming Stick that fits into MHL slots on new TVs or HDMI slots on older models with the help of an adapter.The problem has always been that set-top boxes and Internet televisions slip into obsolescence pretty quickly. More adaptive technology could remove that last, clunky obstacle to full integration.

Stand-alone car stereos and GPSAndrew Eisner of gadget-shopping site Retrevo observed that the third-party auto equipment and accessories that were once pervasive in the CES Auto Pavilion have been largely squeezed out by the major auto manufacturers. The reason: Carmakers aren't quite as cool with outsiders getting a cut of their business as they were when car owners were throwing Kenwood triple stacks into their '78 Trans Ams and blaring Boston's More Than A Feeling.There's still a viable stand-alone GPS market and some car tech holdouts such as QNX and its GoogleTV auto apps system and Pioneer's App Radio, but most of the best upgrades are starting to come from in-house.The new Cadillac Cue and Mercedes-Benz @yourService, improving Ford(F) SYNC Applink and evolving General Motors(GM) OnStar technology combine navigation, Bluetooth, emergency and entertainment options while also giving cars proprietary features that shut out all but third-party app developers. They can communicate with a driver's devices, stream content directly and put essential information in a user-friendly, theft-averse package. The message is fairly clear: If you can make fun games, useful tools or better music and talk content delivery via apps, you're welcome to join. If you're making something a guy at an electronics story is going to have to remove existing technology and fumble through wires to install, take it walking.

Your glassesThe reason for adding tech to specs is as clear as the glasses on your face.Our own Gary Krakow came across PixelOptics' emPower! (exclamation point included) electronic corrective glasses and tried out their composite lenses with a thin transparent LCD-like liquid crystal layer, microchips and micro-machine accelerometers. The liquid crystal layer in each lens changed and activated the near focus lens when needed, but came at a $1,200 price that was just a bit too dear for modest budgets."In a quick hands-on test, the system worked as described. A touch of a hidden button near my left temple activated the reading portion of the emPower! glasses. Of course, they weren't made to my prescription, but turning on the circuit did change the bottom of the lenses into a near focus/reading zone."Considering how long it took to get from trifocals to this point, it's a wonder glasses didn't get a tech assist sooner. Then again, the analog versions didn't have built-in batteries that needed recharging at day's end. >To follow the writer on Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/notteham. >To submit a news tip, send an email to: tips@thestreet.com. RELATED STORIES: >>5 Industries In Peril In 2012>>5 Stubornly Standalone Tech Toys>>10 Things You Should Have Bought In 2011Follow TheStreet.com on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook. >To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints