Even at their most glamorous, trade shows are rarely life-enhancing experiences. Here at the Las Vegas Convention Center, for example, the Adult Expo is held annually, and just happens to be next door to the main drag of the Consumer Electronics Show. So to speak.

And while you can certainly spot the Expo attendees – more leather and fewer laptops as a rule– it soon becomes clear that the erotic swaggering and outlandish costumes are purely cosmetic. Under all the makeup, high heel and rubber thong uniforms, they’re still ‘attendees’, with all the neck-slung badges, bits of paper and free bags and cup holders that entails. Saucy it’s not.

A pretty good year

But there’s an even more subdued feeling at CES this year. Sat in a strangely calm press room, a combination of Credit Crunch™ doom and gloom, the suspicion that nothing much will happen, and a sense of ennui about the fallout – or rather lack of it - from Macworld has created a strange mood. And, aside from one colleague who, between us, is about hand in his notice and intends to do no work whatsoever, I’ve not met a single person who’s palpably excited about the week’s events.

Despite all that, though, I’m still sure that 2009 is going to be a cracking year for the gadget obsessed. Even without the water-into-wine announcements that people (or should that just be the press?) clamor for, it’s as much about where we are as where we’re going. And we’re not in a bad place at all. Even drawing the admittedly lazy comparison of sitting here writing this with previous CES years speaks volumes.

Laptop prisoner

Today, and not entirely for the sake of experimentation, my laptop will be shut in a safe. Yet, I’ve still managed to get all of my email cleared up, made a pile of appointments and cheekily finished off that bit of The Sky at Night I hadn’t caught last week on the BBC iPlayer. That’s thanks to a combination of more pervasive Wi-Fi, a 3G iPhone and better web services than ever (Google Docs, thank you for being both free and rather good). I even wrote most of this on the iPhone’s keyboard. There’s nothing like proving a point for sore thumbs.

I’ve also got my route between the tortuously far-apart epicenters of interest licked, thanks to a combination of GPS and Google Maps, and while I still can’t guarantee I won’t get lost in a city where one hotel car park can be the size of Belgium, I’ve also found a couple of new, tucked-away restaurants via the Vicinity app on the iPhone. Nice.

Little and often

As for the malaise around the conference itself (and yes, Macworld, I’m also casually motioning at you), I suspect the world – or rather the technology world in particular – has simply ceased to become an annual-event type of place. The marketplace is such that companies don’t want to wait a year to make a couple of big announcements, the people that are interested in technology want more information on an as-it-happens basis, and the ones that really do like a big annual bash are… well, not that interested in specifics anyway. Or they work in porn.

So I’m not going to panic about the change of Apple strategy, even if it was handled with all the grace of a rocket-powered pig. I’m not going to complain about the lack of earth-shattering innovation on this year’s show floor when it opens on Thursday and, while I’m at it, I’m certainly not going to miss the HD DVD vs Blu-ray battles of the last few years. As I hope you’ll see over the next few days, we’ve got some fascinating stuff coming up over the coming year or so – but it's going be largely evolutionary, may not come with a plug attached, and may not be from the directions you were expecting.

And that's quite enough thumbing for now.