You know it must be CES time...

When Engadget and all the tech blogs are running in overdrive and there are hundreds of posts in one day.  And CES hasn't officially opened yet.

The gist of 2012 CES:

• Ultrabooks are ultra thin, powerful, sexy, all made possible by Intel's Ivy Bridge.
• Lenovo's got the IdeaPad U300e;
• Acer's got what they're labeling as the world's thinnest laptop, the S5 Ultrabook;
• So does Toshiba, Samsung, 
• Android Tablet is going to dominate this year, we promise (fingers crossed).
• The reportedly thinnest tablet out there - the Toshiba Excite - is a mere 7.7mm thick.  That's less than 1/3rd of an inch.  The problem is, it's also priced high enough to make you wonder how they'll sell Honeycomb tablets when Ice Cream Sandwich is the current OS that everyone wants.
• But finally we'll get the first of an expected flood of quad-core Android tablets, including Lenovo and Acer. 
• And...ahem...even Polaroid is getting in on the Android tablets.
• Don't forget Velocity Micro, too.
• And the gazillion Android phones.  If you're going to buy a phone, why don't you wait until after all the CES announcements?  The Galaxy Note and its enormous 5" screen is coming to AT&T, while US Cellular is getting its first LTE Android phone in April.
• Oh, and TVs will be sporting Google TV or Ice Cream Sandwich Android.  And this dongle for your not-so-smart TV.  It's Google TV redux.
• But you know, CES isn't all about Google.  There's 3M's new touch-surface 46" table display.
• One Laptop per Child introduces its $100 tablet, the XO 3.0.   Linux, of course.
• Uhm...and Nokia will show off and reveal its North America comeback plans, including the expected Lumia 900.  Get ready to laugh out loud, if it does not support LTE or quad-core.

We can distill CES 2012 down to five topics really: Google, Ultra, Touch, Tablet, and Nokia's huge, incredibly important and paradigm-shifting announcement.