(FORTUNE Small Business) – Every November crowds of small business owners invade Fall Comdex, the nation's largest trade show, in Las Vegas. The scene is always the same: They enter like children rushing into a toy store with wild expectations and leave exhausted, weighted down with tech goodies.

For those willing to deal with the terminally congested convention halls, Fall Comdex offers an early peek at new high-tech products and technologies that the public might not see for months. This year, the event, which is being held from November 15 to 19, has expanded beyond its computer-industry roots and now encompasses areas such as office equipment, consumer electronics, and telecommunications.

Some of the most interesting products of the fall season may be some of the smallest. (All prices listed here are suggested retail prices.) For example, a number of cell-phone companies now offer telephones with built-in personal digital assistants. Flip open the keypad on Qualcomm's pdQ smart phones (800-349-4188, www.qualcomm.com), priced at $500 and up, and you'll find the touch screen for the phone's integrated PDA. The PDA offers the same features as 3Com's Palm and Pilot devices and runs the same software. You can exchange data with a PC or look up someone in the PDA's address book and dial the phone number automatically.

If you own one of Motorola's diminutive StarTac cell phones, you can enhance it with the company's new StarTac clipOn Organizer ($299; 800-331-6456, www.mot.com). You can use the device separately or clip it onto the back of a StarTac phone and dial numbers automatically from the unit's phone book. The clipOn isn't much larger than a credit card, but it offers a calendar, contact list, phone book, to-do list, and other features.

Mobile executives may also be interested in Toshiba America Information Systems' new models in its Satellite series of budget-priced small office/home office notebooks (800-867-4422, www.toshiba.com). The Satellite 2615DVD ($1,999) comes with a 12.1-inch, active-color display and a 433-megahertz (MHz) Intel Mobile Celeron processor. The Satellite 2655DVD ($2,399) offers a 14.1-inch, active-color display and a 466MHz Mobile Celeron. Both units have a six-gigabyte hard disk, a DVD-ROM drive, 64 megabytes of RAM, a 56-kilobit-per-second modem, and a copy of the Lotus SmartSuite Millennium Edition application suite.

While an expensive PBX system is overkill for a small business, Ericsson's new $499 CyberGenie PC cordless phone system (which connects to a Windows 98-based PC) promises to make a small office seem much larger to callers (800-374-2776; www.ericsson.com). Not only can it control up to ten cordless handsets on two phone lines, but it can also read back e-mail, accept and forward faxes, manage voice mail, and alert you when messages come in.

Going into the next millennium, Advanced Micro Devices (800-222-9323, www.amd.com) finds itself as leader of the pack. AMD's new Athlon processors, available in speeds ranging from 500MHz to 650MHz, are touted as being cheaper yet more powerful than Intel's flagship Pentium III processors (see Advanced Micro Devices' Website for test data).

Fall Comdex should be awash with new Athlon-based PCs from Compaq, IBM, and other PC manufacturers. Happy shopping.