CES: Drama in the desert, but what's the story?

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada is a massive industry event at which the world's consumer electronics and personal technology companies show off their new gear, but will we see anything really new there?

The battleground is the living room, and it's all about setting the standards and building the products that will create control of future markets, and it's being going on for years, the computer industry versus the electronics players.

The most painful moment of last year's show came during Bill Gate's demo of Media Center, Microsoft's foray into the living room. The demo gods frowned once more upon the mighty Gates and the media-centric version of Windows failed ignominiously during his keynote speech. His carefully blank expression, contrasted with the wry amusement of the crowd, captured the drama of the huge struggle that's going on between the Microsofts and the Intels, and the Apples and the Sonys, for control of our digital lives.

The problem is partly to do with bridging the gap between simple devices with relatively few functions and complex computing devices with an enormous number of settings and options, including the world of pain known as networking. To give you just one example of how difficult it it is to get technologies to converge, many vendors have now launched hybrid music products that are supposed to make it easier to stream your music from your PC to your hi-fi. Some are quite fun, but whenever I've played with them, I always end up spending more time configuring them than actually listening to music. It's always a huge relief to return to the familiar simplicity of a basic CD player, something that gets the job done and doesn't require learning a new interface or setting up a network connection.

The big story at last year's CES was high-definition television, which will be making its way across the Atlantic this year when Sky launches its first high-def offering. I expect to see loads more HD-compatible products and more spine-tingling HD demonstrations. In the battle for the next high-performance replacement for the DVD format, both the Blu-ray and the HD DVD sides will be setting out their stalls and trying to look like winners.

We'll see loads more big LCD and plasma TVs, and there are will also be some interestingly small moving pictures, in the form of tiny handheld projectors that you can use for business presentations. We'll see more cute hard-drive-based camcorders, and a host of slender ultracompact digital cameras, as vendors continue to pack more and more performance into tiny marvels.

We won't be hearing from Apple, which will reveal its plans in San Francisco next week, at Macworld. It's a ghostly presence at this show, conspicuous by its absence. It's a shame: it would be fun to get Apple and Microsoft under the same roof, if only to see if Steve Job's special relationship with those demo gods could survive the Las Vegas Hilton.

We'll be hearing a keynote speech from Bill Gates again, and another from Paul Otellini of Intel. On the consumer electronics side, there's Howard Stringer, the new boss of Sony, as well as press conferences from Samsung, Sharp and Philips. There will also be keynotes from Terry Semel of Yahoo and Larry Page of Google, reflecting the way in which search technology has come to dominate the digital media landscape. We will, inevitably, hear a lot of hot air.

Part of the way the technology industry works is by constantly selling us a vision of a better future, and so it's always hyping small improvements in its products as though they were seismic shifts in the space-time continuum. I'm sure we'll see many more MP3 players this year, as well as lots more accessories for the iPod, but it's hard to imagine that any of these are going to rock our world.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this year we're in for a bravura performance of the tech industry's favourite show tune, Bigger and smaller and faster and cheaper! This rousing little number is sung with great excitement when there's nothing else that extraordinary going on. But who knows, it's early days. I've already checked out a small remote-control helicopter, a pair of fairly convincing 3D goggles, and a device that boosts your mobile phone signal at home, so it's not all bad. I look forward to being amazed by many wonderful things over the four days of the show.