It’s the end of a long and tiring week but it has been fantastic. As ever one of the best things about CES is catching up with old friends. The highlight for me was The Digital Lifestyle.com party, it was great to meet everybody. The facilities at Cntrstg were great, the whole week it was the best place to go and catchup with writing and relax with other bloggers.

In terms of the show floors there was not a lot of things new.  There were some interesting things, like the Allio HD TV with built in PC (video out soon), Sony’s little P series Viao and of course  Windows 7. There was a great buzz around Windows 7 lots of people checking out the multi-touch Windows 7 demo machines.

Windows Media Center had a great buzz around it too, any time I walked past the Media Center display there was a big crowd around it with the Microsoft guys showing off the Windows 7 build of Media Center. On Microsoft’s stand there was a HP TouchSmart with Windows 7 on it and lots of people were playing with touch on Windows Media Center. As I have said before I think Media Center is THE best way of experiencing touch on Windows 7, why try and press the little buttons in Windows Media Player with your finger when you can use the larger UI of Media Center and use the great way it scrolls and responds with touch.

The other trend I noticed was there were netbooks everywhere, not just exhibiters showing off their hardware. Lots of the people covering the show had netbooks, there were hardly any around last year and this year the press room was full of people using them. I found my EEE PC very handy and I only used my Tablet for doing editing, podcasting and some longer blog posts.

So while some people are saying shows like CES are going to die I can still see the value in getting people together in one place, no mater how good connections we have with Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts etc there is no substitution for meeting face to face with someone you follow online all year long.

My next task is to try and get some of the content out, I have some videos and lots of interview to edit and post, they should coming out over the next week or so. I will have a post CES special on [tmcs] this week with some great interviews and the recording of the award show will be out in a couple of weeks, so now it’s time to head for the airport, get home and start installing Windows 7…

 

A random selection of photos:

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