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A new genre of Show-Biz has started to rise from the ashes of the pomp and glory of past computer shows. Where we were used to look at the latest accomplishments in personal computing, the eternal battles of Intel and AMD or ATI vs. 3dfx or nVidia, whichever came first, the new kid on the block is the broad genre of consumer electronics.

Accordingly, the name of the expo is Consumer Electronics Show or CES and it has been growing for the past few years with this year setting new records in attendance and what it had to offer. Needless to say that most of the rank and names in the PC business were present, partially, however, because of the satellite events like for example the CyberX Games LAN party sponsored by AMD, ATI, ABIT, DFI, Shuttle, Mushkin and OCZ aside from numerous outfitters of ladies apparel sporting the Linux Penguin on the front of the thong or simply an "Access Denied" logo in the, er, more private areas. My favorites in this case were the Geekwearz displays, the Fatal1ty brand was too subdued to provide the stuff that dreams are made of. The backpack, LAN-carry-on bags were present in the form of Case Ace.

Amongst the PC manufacturers, quite a few that were present on the show floor skipped the PC business altogether and concentrated on the entertainment factor - who would have thought that Albatron and MSI would be throwing HDTV instead of mainboards at the masses. Others were spread out in the usual fashion across the surrounding hotel show floors with the usual drawback that cab lines were in the order of 30-45 minutes and buses were not running at all times, meaning that just getting there was already half the fun. And then there was still the issue of finding the suite, which could turn into an adventure of its own - battling sometimes not too cooperative hotel clerks for directions.

Key events were, at least by sheer volume, the car audio sessions, cell phones and HDTV. After looking at some 50,000 cellular phones, the excitement somewhat subsided - the same goes for the HDTV displays. It is one thing to watch them on-site but a different story altogether trying to show pictures so we rather skip that part.

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