After sitting through press conferences from several of the big and broad—televisions to cell phones—consumer electronics companies today, the day before the opening of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics show, I have more questions than answers, questions that I’ll investigate further as the show progresses. Here’s a sampling of my list—please ask your questions in the comments, and I’ll see if I can track answers to those down as well.

• How much do those crazy-thin 55-inch OLED TVs cost?

• And how long are they going to last before they color shift? The blue OLED pixels have had longevity issues—are they really fixed?

• How do voice control and gesture control TVs deal with family squabbles? I fear these control options, intriguing as they are, are going to make me yearn for the days when we all just battled over the remote.

• If the refrigerator is talking to the stove and tells it what to cook, and it’s also suggesting menus based on “fitness goals”, is it secretly also communicating to the bathroom scale?

• Are consumers really ready for rooftop solar systems they can wrap up and give someone for Christmas?

• How much computing power does it take to do the image processing for a beyond-HDTV 8 megapixel television? And what is that baby going to cost?

• Does anyone really care about Google TV, MySpace TV, or any other form of WebTV until we see what Apple comes up with?

Add your questions below. And follow my CES explorations on Twitter @TeklaPerry.

The OLPC is showing off the latest prototype of their affordable tablet for developing countries, the XO 3.0. It sports:

• an optional indoor/outdoor Pixel Qi display (a technology that we called a winner in 2010, developed by former Dream Jobber Mary Lou Jepsen) 
• a hand crank and solar panel for power (six minutes of cranking for an hour of power)
• a Marvell Armada PXA618 ARM-based system-on-a-chip that allows the tablet to run on just 2 Watts. (We also profiled Marvell CEO Sehat Sutardja last year.

The OLPC hasn’t finalized the price, because they’re still deciding on materials, but they’re shooting for under $100.

Still, they’re not the only bargain tablet-maker around these days. The Canadian company Datawind has garnered lots of attention for their Aakash Ubislate 7, a tablet device that the Indian governmnet plans to sell for a subsidized price of less than $50.

For more, check out Gizmodo’s quick video, or The Verge’s in-depth reveiw.

Hologram alternatives for 3-D video

Pixel Qi’s latest low-power displays

Glasses of the Future

The IEEE Communications Society booth highlighted a couple of mobile-focused applications. The first is an app called Smyle, that allows groups to chat, share locations and images, and collaborate on real-time whiteboards. For example, if your friend was lost at CES, you could load a map of the show floor, and then draw the best route to meet up. The app is free, and is available for Android and desktop browsers.

The second demo at the booth was an interesting attempt to add more context to online multimedia content. Telcordia’s 3D Visual Media Search Technology aims to improve user’s experience with online video by extracting individual frames and presenting them in an interactive 3D shape. This allows the user to see if the media is really what they’re looking for, before they begin streaming it. The visualization also provides a quick way to search the content for moments of interest, like scoring plays in a sporting event.