Consumer Electronics Show promises gizmo gasfest

THE INQ begins its long trek out to Las Vegas tomorrow to cover the latest goings-on at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place this week. Before we trade cold, miserable England for cold, miserable Nevada, here's a preview of what we're expecting from the show.

Although the show doesn't officially start until Thursday, Wednesday is all about Billy Gates. His opening pre-show keynote is widely expected to bring the first announcement about Xbox 2, although some wires are doubting that this will be the case. Whatever happens, we'll be partying all evening. After the INQ's overwhelming success at the Tiger Direct/AMD Charity PC Race last year, we're going to be back again kicking ass and aiming for that sub-7-minute time. I've got my eye on you, Demerjian. When we've finished doing our charity bit, we're going to be kicking back at the Bellagio with the party of the week, hosted by The Tech Zone and Abit. We will have spies there to bring you all the juciest titbits that we get product managers sozzled enough to tell us.

As we wrote this morning, Craig Barrett - Intel's soon-to-be ex-CEO - will be talking more about the digital home, digital media and the like on the Thursday morning. He will be appearing, we can only hope, with Aerosmith. We're not worthy!

Thursday will also bring a little bit of interesting rivalry. Top RAM makers Corsair and OCZ will be squaring off in the evening as both host parties for selected invitees. That is, of course, if we have any energy left after running all over Vegas to catch conferences from Ebay, DivX, MTV and the HD-DVD consortium. We are also planning some drinks with Wired sex columnist Gina Lynn, who should give us some, er, interesting conversation.

Friday is a quieter day on the press conference front, so we're going to take the opportunity to go rumour-mongering and seeing if we can hunt down any truth in some of the elusive whispers that we will no doubt be hearing. We also have a little bit of a surprise for you chaps and chapettes, because there are a couple of other very cool things going on in town that we're going to cover for you - but you'll have to wait and see. We're going to top the evening off by hijacking the G4 Tech TV party and turning it into Channel Inquirer!

We will be keeping our ears to the ground and our eyes on the exclusives as we spend the best part of a week soaking up the tech industry's premiere US event, now that Comdex is gone. We certainly won't be keeping our ears tuned to hip-hop and our eyes on the hot Vegas honeys. Oh no siree. We're going to let Tony Dennis do that. He flies out to Las Vegas today to give some kind of keynote on the convergence between pornography and technology. He should know all about this, it's rumoured. µ