Well, that was a waste of everyone's time

The Consumer Electronics Show will have packed up and left Las Vegas by the end of today, so what fantastic new inventions will we be seeing in our homes in the next few years?





Errrm, not much actually.

The CES used to be the place where we'd all get a glimpse of the latest technology, the sort of thing we'd never seen before but yet, something we could buy within a few years time in our local Dixons.
We saw the VCR in 1970, Pong made it's debut in 1975, people looked in awe at the CD and camcorder in 1981, gawped at the processing power of the Commodore 64 a year later and applauded the DVD in 1996.

This year though, we haven't seen much, nay anything new.
Just look at one of this year's 'Best in Show': Ford and Microsoft have collaborated to create what they believe is ground-breaking, must have technology that will allow you to select mp3's, reply to text messages or make phone calls just by shouting at your dashboard.
The only problem is that isn't new technology, not in the slightest. Top Gear viewers may remember Jeremy Clarkson venting his frustration at an identical system in a Mercedes CL-65, before sending the German voice-activated sat-nav to Warsaw. In other words, a CES award winner is a technology that has been commercially available for a good few years, just with a minor tweak. You can even go down to your local dealer tomorrow and pick up a Ford Fiesta with bluetooth already fitted.

Then there's the Blu-Ray - HD-DVD battle. This battle has been going on for a while, mainly fuelled by the announcement of the Playstation 3.
The manufacturers were getting wary that people weren't buying either model because they didn't know which version would become the norm (hands up, who bought a Betamax recorder?).
So LG came along and some boffin in their creatives department decided "Why not have both?" and hence, the BH1OO. It's cheaper than a Blu-Ray player, will do twice as much as a Blue-Ray player and so, in theory, it's the one to buy. Debate over, no news story.

The only thing that actually sounds of any interest is the 'One laptop per Child' scheme, basically a £50 laptop designed to make computing accessible to those in third world countries. It's a superb idea, but one that's got lost amongst the gimmicks from the multi-nationals.

And that's been the problem with CES. The whole show hasn't been about inventions, it's about compressing as many stupid ideas into one to give the impression of a new invention. I don't want my PC to control my central heating via a touch-screen panel linked to my XBOX 360. I don't want to transmit videos from the internet via WiFi to watch on my cooker. I would like a stable Microsoft operating system that isn't riddled with security flaws, but that doesn't sound quite as fancy.