The fifth annual “D” Conference, run by the Wall Street Journal with hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, was so full of digiluminaries that nearly every time the name of some tech macher was invoked, the person in question was spotted in the audience. The highlight of the event was a joint appearance by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- closer to a lovefest than a smackdown, but not without some barbed interchanges or two. (Like when Jobs mentioned how much he liked Bill’s Zune team because “they’re our customers” for iPod.)

There were also a host of new products, news of which was embargoed until their release at the conference. I’ve already covered one in depth: Microsoft Surface. Here’s a rundown of a few more. Please note that these are not official product reviews--none of them have undergone careful evaluation in the field:

Palm Foleo. The people who brought you the Palm Pilot and the Treo unveiled what they call “a mobile companion”--a two-pound email and Web-browsing gizmo with a 10-inch screen and a full size keyboard. It works in tandem with your smartphone (though not yet with a Blackberry). The demo itself was contentious, since Palm founder Jeff Hawkins tried to stick to his script while the crowd was literally screaming for him to start showing them what the thing could do. And when he did, it was clear that this first version had big lapses First of all, it's weird that a product like this--which wants to be a use-anywhere email device--is designed as a satellite to a smartphone, which (along with Wi-Fi) provides the connection to your mail and the Internet. (On a short trip, if you have your smartphone with you, there's less of need for a Foleo. On a long trip, you'll have your full-featured laptop.) There's no calendar and it can’t do streaming video. The Linux based system doesn't run Microsoft Office, but can read its files. At $600 (even with an introductory $100 rebate), it's pricey. On the other hand, with its flash memory, nice battery life (more akin to a cell phone than a laptop) and nice design, it breaks ground for next-gen ultra-light devices. Available late summer.

Livescribe. Ever hear of “paper based computing?” Livescribe says it's here. It begins with a cigar-shaped smartpen that can remember what you’re writing and synch it with audio captured during the writing process. It can also make your pen and paper into a computing device. It works like this: turn on the recorder in the pen and jot down cues of either words or images. When you go back over your work, just touch the pen on a word and the pen plays back what was spoken when you wrote down the word originally. Livescribe can also do other tricks, like recognizing when you’re doing math --and reporting (on its one-line display) the solution to the arithmetic problem you write down on the paper. Downside: though the scheme is trumpeted as really simple, it's actually a bit complicated, and none of it works if you don't have special paper imprinted with tiny dots. The pen will cost “under $200,” and will be available late this year.

RealPlayer. The latest version of the ubiquitous Real media software addresses complaints of previous revs by being less intrusive in pushing Real’s services. But the big advance is that in addition to the normal jukebox functions, you can with a single click download a “personal use copy” of any non-copyprotected video on the Internet (including those on YouTube). Then you can put it in your library, slot in on a playlist, and even burn it to DVD. Formats suppoted include Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real. It remains to be seen whether YouTube and those who upload videos for streaming purposes will warm to this feature, but plenty of users have been waiting for something like this. It's available in June for Windows; Mac users will have to wait for some months.

Mahalo. Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs (which he sold to AOL) has rethought search and says he’s found a niche--a site with human-created result pages for the 10,000 most-requested search items (He claims these comprise a fourth of all Internet searches, though one competing search exec told me that the top 10K searches are only a tiny percentage of all queries). Mahalo (it means "thanks" in Hawaiian) has hired dozens of people to hand-create results for what they think will be the most popular searches (When something comes up in the news, they'll jump on it.). Type in a popular item like “Paris hotels” or “Amy Winehouse” and you get a well organized and relevant dossier of popular links, fun facts, images, videos and even a user-generated set of links. In fact, a Mahalo result page seems to be something between a search result and a Wikipedia item. The alpha version, with a few thousand results and growing, is online now.