Top 10 best and worst of CES

The best and worst of CES 2010

It's been a long hard week for many people in Las Vegas this week, as over 100,000 people flocked to the city for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Three huge convention centre halls and numerous other locations have been used to demonstrate the next generation of electronic technology, and a dizzying parade of new systems, peripherals and add-ons have been put on display.

Shaun Nichols and I have now headed home, and will do the rest of the coverage remotely. But in keeping with last year's Top 10 list we've compiled our choices for the best and worst aspects of the show, and some tips for how to get the best out of your CES visit.

THE BEST:

Honourable mention: 3D TV
Shaun Nichols: We'll say more on the 3D platform later in the list, but there are some impressive applications for 3D displays, particularly on the gaming front.

If you were to ask most people five or six years ago about gesture-controlled gaming, many would dismiss it as a passing fad or a gimmick. Lo and behold, the Wii comes along and the use of gestures to control movement is seen as a revolution.

There is likely to be a similar application for 3D TV sets. As the sets become cheaper and more widely adopted, hopefully it will emerge, and the money and energy spent on these systems will not go to waste.

Iain Thomson: In some applications 3D displays actually do make some sense, as we saw at the show.

Movies in particular can be rather good, provided that the director doesn't do lots of pointless 'monster lunges directly at you' type shots. While the effect isn't true 3D it's a pretty good facsimile of the reality.

But some things didn't seem to get a lot out of the 3D environment. We both played the Avatar 3D first person shooter and, as far as I was concerned, the effect was ropey and added nothing to the gameplay.

Based on the buzz we're going to be seeing a lot more of 3D, so we'd better get used to it and developers had better pick up their game.

5. Nvidia's Tegra platform
Shaun Nichols: With everyone looking to roll out smaller, more efficient, more powerful tablet models, some were asking who was going to provide the processing muscle. Nvidia answered the call big time with its updated Tegra platform.

Running with eight independent processors and the first dual-core Coretex A9 chip, Tegra looks to be pretty formidable. While the competition was weighted in Tegra's favour, the comparisons Nvidia made to Intel's Atom chip showed the new platform to be more than impressive.

If the new round of tablets is going to take off, more powerful and efficient processors will be needed. Tegra looks like it may just be able to meet those demands.

Iain Thomson: Nvidia's updated platform certainly looks the business and I think it'll do very well in the market.

Computing is getting increasingly visual and Nvidia is in a good position to capitalise on the shift. For a lot of the new tablets coming out with multitouch support, graphic controls are the way forward and that trend is accelerating.

However, there was one aspect of Nvidia's news that I found a little disturbing - the amount of times it was mentioned putting it in cars. To my mind there is already far too much distraction for drivers, be it mobile phones or entertainment systems, and we need to cut down on this, not add to it.