CES: Top 10 best and worst of CES

2. 4G announcements
Shaun Nichols: Iain had a lot to say on this one, so I'll keep my part short and sweet.

The WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE) formats have been at war for quite some time over which will become the standard to replace 3G wireless broadband. This has mistakenly led to both claiming to be '4G'.

The problem is that neither is actually called 4G, and using the term to describe them is misleading for consumers who don't understand that they're two different formats.

Carriers and handset manufacturers could have gone a long way towards clearing things up this year at CES, but none of them bothered.

Iain Thomson: OK, rant at the ready as this has been bothering me for some time. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said last year that neither LTE nor WiMax were sufficiently advanced to be called 4G.

The handset manufacturers decided that they weren't going to listen to a bunch of stuffy old engineers when they had these advertising campaigns worked out, and ignored the ruling.

This put the ITU in something of a quandary. It's the United Nations agency for mobile communications and is used to manufacturers sticking to the rules. But if it stuck with its decision, the risk was that it would lose naming rights and cause market confusion.

So it relaxed its rules to include LTE, WiMax and HSPA+ as 4G standards, and no doubt the original specification will now be called 5G.

I freely admit that I'm a pedant about this, but walking through a sea of 4G signs for the past few days has really made my teeth grind.

1. Microsoft keynote
Iain Thomson: In last year's list we were rather cutting about Steve Ballmer's opening keynote at CES. We were too hard on him then, but this one was much worse.

The first keynote of CES should set the tone for the whole show, a speech to excite or educate the listeners.

Instead we got a bunch of old news being recycled, a very dull rehash of the features of Windows Phone 7 and the news that Windows 8 will run on ARM processors, something Microsoft had announced at a press conference earlier in the day.

It was a shockingly bad performance from Ballmer and the Microsoft team, and I hope that the CEA is rethinking giving the company the top slot based on current performance.

Shaun Nichols: The Ballmer keynote was bad last year because it seemed like nothing went right. This year, however, there were no cock-ups to blame for the failure of the keynote.

I suspect that one of the main reasons Apple no longer headlines the Macworld Expo is because the company doesn't want to be forced to demonstrate new devices every year whether they're ready or not.

This year, CES came at a time where Microsoft simply didn't have a lot of new products ready to be shown.

The new Kinect features were interesting, but hardly groundbreaking. The rest of the keynote had all the excitement of a grass-growing competition. At the end the reaction among those in the press corps was "is that it?"

Ballmer might be wise to take a leaf from Steve Jobs's book. This year's keynote was definitely missing a "one more thing".