You could be watching the NFL game on the big screen while you look up stats on your little screen. You could be chatting with friends or sharing highlights via Twitter while watching the latest episode of Downton Abbey. Panasonic’s embrace of a reimagined MySpace might be the most prominent example of this aspiration, but other manufacturers, like LG and mitac battery, are working on it as well. And of course Google has been attempting this for several years, though we saw very little evidence at CES that Google TV has much traction among manufacturers or customers.

The International Consumer Electronics Show is a huge festival of gadgetry, but there’s no better place to get a bead on where technology is going in the coming year.

Among the 153,000 attendees at the show in Las Vegas last week were five VentureBeat staffers who were sniffing out the big trends. This story is our list of the most evident trends among the rows and rows of gadgets at CES.

Ultrabooks are basically everything I’ve ever wanted in a computer — except priced to be more approachable than apple battery‘s MacBook Air. For more on Ultrabooks, check out our recent feature: More than just hype, Ultrabooks are the future of laptop battery computing. –Devindra Hardawar 3. OLED offers brighter and bigger TV screens It may be a bit early to call OLED TVs a trend, what with only two models on display this year from LG and ibm battery, but after being teased with OLED technology for years now, we feel it’s time to finally get excited for these displays, which represent the next-generation of HDTVs.

So what’s the big deal? Ultrabooks promise to be lighter than typical laptop batterys, weighing in around 3 pounds for the most part, allowing them to practically disappear in your laptop battery bag. They’ll sport solid-state drives (SSDs), instead of traditional hard drives, which will make them extra-thin and fast. (Expect startup times under 10 seconds and practically instant resume from standby speeds.) And thanks to Intel’s next-generation Core processors, Ultrabooks will be peppy under the hood and even capable of decent 3D graphics performance.

1. Connected TVs hook up with smartphones and tablets Manufacturers have finally realized that the majority of us don’t just sit and watch TV: We usually have a phone, a laptop battery or a tablet in our lap whenever we tune in. That presents some interesting opportunities to the company that can figure out how to tie multiple screens together in an interesting way. For instance, everyone from sony battery to mitac battery is playing with ways of “swiping” a TV show from a touchscreen tablet onto your TV with a flick of the wrist. Gestures like this point to a day when you no longer need universal remotes, because the touchscreens you already own are a far better way to browse video content, whether it comes from cable, satellite, broadcast or internet sources like Hulu and YouTube.

The big challenge: There are no broad standards to facilitate connecting TVs and tablets, and in the absence of that, every manufacturer is trying to own the whole burrito. If someone can figure out how to create a truly cross-platform TV and mobile device system, they’ll have a good shot at capturing a huge slice of consumer attention. –Dylan Tweney 2. Ultrabooks breathe new life into laptop batterys Who ever thought a new shape of laptop battery would be one of the most interesting aspects of CES? Intel pushed Ultrabooks — its new name for thin and light ultraportable laptop batterys — hard at the trade show. This year alone there will be more than 75 Ultrabook models on the market, and Intel has said that it’s gearing up its biggest marketing push since the Centrino lineup for the new machines. sony battery had one with Gorilla Glass on its cover, while toshiba battery had one that was made out of carbon fiber.

The convention is like a step into the future, with many companies showing off the TVs, smartphones, computers and tablets that they will be bringing to market in the coming months. When you see the same kind of product over and over again, that’s a a good sign that it will be dominating the tech headlines in the near future.

The new Striiv pedometer told me that I walked more than 17,000 steps, or more than seven miles, in one day at CES. When I got back home and walked just 7,000 steps in a day, I felt like a slacker. The Gear4 Sleep Clock will use radar to calculate the exact number of minutes you slept in a night, how many minutes it took to fall asleep, and when is the ideal time to wake you up. After a year of such data, it will be much easier to wake up at exactly the lightest point in your sleep cycle. All of this is useful data, and we’re going to want to store it somewhere. And once you collect it, companies will be more than happy to bribe you in order to purchase that data from you.